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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2022 3:55 pm 
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By the way: there's a picture in the BBC website right now of a couple of soldiers standing in front of a field gun. The gun in question is a 122mm M1931/37; which is to say it was designed in 1931 then modified in 1937. It was one of the corps level guns of the Red Army during WW II; and was replaced by a new gun in 1955. So unless those two are standing around in a war memorial somewhere, things are getting screwy.

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 Post Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2022 3:59 am 
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I think the question now is whether the Republicans would shut off the funding spigot to Ukraine if they take control of Congress. Kevin McCarthy has already said that he'll try; the Putin fanboys in the GOP are biding their time until the American public tires of high gas prices.

Even the progressive wing of the Democrats just had to eat crow for letting their tankie fringe(1) momentarily get the better of their judgment. A group of people predisposed to seeing the US as the aggressor in any conflict can be bent around to thinking that Putin would make nice if only we stopped provoking him.

Russian propaganda has been hard at work on both the far right and far left, the difference being that the far right is driving the bus in the GOP, whereas the far left doesn't normally get anywhere near the steering wheel. But the mainstream Democrats might not enjoy being put in the position of suddenly being the pro-war party.

(1) The more virulent members of the extremely online tankie fringe make a habit of cruelly trolling oppressed peoples whilst patting themselves on the back for fighting the good fight against CIA influence operations.

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 Post Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2022 4:31 pm 
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The Democrats are by and large quite happy to the the anti-Putin/Republican party. The Republicans are in a bit of a bind, though. By and large they realize that running with their Putinist tendencies is a stone political loser. But if they take the house, it's unlikely to be by more than the number of stone tankies in their caucus; so they'll probably find themselves dragged into being the Putin party because the new speaker is too much of an invertibrate to stop it.

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 Post Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2022 3:44 am 
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The Democrats are happy to be the anti-Putin party but they're not happy to be tagged as the Inflation and Expensive Gas Party. You rarely ever lose a bet by underestimating the attention span and willingness to sacrifice of the American electorate.

Which means there's an opening for the Republicans to be the Talking Sternly At Putin While Not Lifting an Actual Finger Against Him Party. Plenty of voters fail to make the distinction between posturing and policy, and if someone promises that they can have their cake and eat it too, well, bring on the Twinkies.

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 Post Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2022 3:55 pm 
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Could well be, though even with MSM help it'll be tricky.

But in the meantime, the video the Ukrainians released of their newest torpedo coming up to a Russian frigate will probably be studied in naval circles for quite some time. I wonder when we'll hear what happened to the frigate (besides bad stuff), as opposed to the happy dust the Russians are saying about how everything was intercepted and no damage was done because of some mythical stakhanovite, who spotted the whole attack by himself (and was given a medal for it), who then alerted the magically competent authorities who dealt with it all in seconds.

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 Post Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2022 4:13 am 
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So the Russians were basically starved out of Kherson and Putin's troop surge appears to be accomplishing very little. Welp.

Here's hoping probably-Speaker-to-be Kevin McCarthy doesn't manage to stuff things up too badly for Ukraine. I mean, I hope there's still some Republicans left who hate Putin more than Biden, but this shouldn't have to be a question.

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 Post Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2022 9:13 am 
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Being pro-Putin is something of a minority position among the Republican voters; if the Democrats put together a bill to fund aid to the Ukrainians, then finding the needed twoish Republican congresscritters to sign off on a Discharge Petition for it probably won't be too hard.

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 Post Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2022 4:17 am 
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In theory, yes. I still don't put it past them to do literally anything - even screw Europe - to troll Biden. I was going to bet that McCarthy would launch a dozen spurious investigations (Hunter Biden's laptop!) but am hoping that the failure of the MAGAts to get elected in nearly all swing states will impress upon the Republicans the waning appetite for crazy. I'm waiting to see if this "Trump's a loser" rhetoric sticks.

But you know, these are Republicans, so they'll probably find a new crazy person to rally around by 2024.

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 Post Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2022 2:50 pm 
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Could be.

In other, possibly more 'oops' related news: it seems that a Russian missile has come down on a Polish farm and killed a couple of people. The Poles don't seem to be amused.

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 Post Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2022 3:04 am 
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Looks like it was a Ukrainian missile that they shot at an incoming Russian missile, and missed.

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 18, 2022 11:54 am 
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Part of the problem with ballistic anti-aircraft weapons; they come down.

But in other missile related news, there is a story circulating that one of the Russian cruise missiles recently launched at Ukraine was a nuclear capable model that had the nuke removed but not replaced with anything. Which is to say it has the standard Russian 'attach nuclear warhead here' fitting, but the nose was empty when it came down.

I've seen a comment that it might have been a decoy; but if you're going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to haul the multi-million dollar missile into the air to launch it, then not mounting a conventional warhead costing a hundred dollars or so is pretty senseless; if it gets through then it might as well do some damage. So I suspect it's just a typical wartime oops, from someone who's running out of missiles without the 'attach nuke here' fitting.

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 Post Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2022 4:20 am 
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So Ukrainians are inclined to keep fighting through the winter. Will the Dnieper river will be frozen enough to make bridges irrelevant?

How do you think this war is going to end? Now that Ukraine is winning, Zelenskyy does not want to stop short of kicking Russia all the way back to the pre-2014 border. Which, I reckon, is gonna be a long fight. Purely topographically speaking, retaking Crimea looks tough.

Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 to a 5 year term. What happens if the war is still going on in 2024? Does Ukraine hold a presidential election under wartime conditions? Do they suspend elections under emergency powers and uh... The only way I see this ending quickly is if the approximately two-and-a-half Russian military commanders who have access to Putin escort him onto a one-way plane to Belarus at gunpoint (assuming they don't just throw him out a window), and that still looks like a low probability event.

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 Post Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2022 6:58 pm 
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Strictly a gut feeling, but I'm now thinking Ukraine gets all of it, their whole border restored.

At some point this comes down to a question of desire: Ukrainians seem to care a lot about pushing the Russians out, but ultimately Russia doesn't care THAT much about holding Ukraine. Maybe Putin does, but the soldiers in their army don't. You're seeing that imbalance play out as Russia keeps losing territory.

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 Post Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2022 2:01 am 
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Crimea actually isn't the worst of the battlefields; yes, there is only a fairly narrow way to attack it, but it's also got only one good supply point that's currently out of order. Fighting their way straight into the other lands they lost in 2014 will probably be rather less fun simply because it's harder to starve the defenders out.

I am, btw, amused that 300 days after we offered Zelenskyy a ride he took it; and used it to ask for more ammunition.

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 Post Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:22 am 
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Are Russia's logistics and/or defences so sh*te that they can't even resupply Crimea by cargo ship? I would've thought that was the entire point of holding a piece of coastal territory that only fails to meet the definition of an island on a technicality.

Zelenskyy seems like a man of genuine mettle but I'm reflexively sceptical of the whole hero worship thing that's grown up around him. I've been too disappointed before - looking at Aung San Suu Kyi here - to project onto him the qualities that I wish a freedom fighter would have. I read the article about him in Time and gleaned one mildly alarming factoid from it; he was once a huge fan of Lee Kuan Yew. One can see why - Lee practically invented the one-man anti-corruption crusader mythos - but I hope that should Zelenskyy survive the war, he doesn't lean into the "enlightened despot" vibe. That would take a level of self-awareness that few world leaders seem to possess.

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