Here we go again-Ukraine once again

[Gorpet]

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

Oy vey?

I wish my grandparents were more active in my life.

In America,People work all their lives pay into the great Social Security system. And this was promised to them. The scheme was you pay so much out of your paycheck.And at a certain age What the government took from your paycheck because they thought you when you got older and could no longer be a productive ant.

You would get ,Well they lied they took the money and created the American Welfare system.And to this day those who payed into that are the homeless Americans.

[tmccarthy]

Originally Posted by Armistead

Any clue what weapon system this is,30mm?. Notice those Russians behind the tank...

It sounded like 30mm autocannon to me. Otherwise could only assume it's fairly modern because of the video targeting screen. I did notice the soldiers in the back and was sorry to see that they may have been killed and at least the 3 crew members inside were almost certainly killed.

[Onkel Neal]

Bad day for a tank crew. I'm beginning to think tanks are obsolete.

[Skybird]

Tanks are great for mobile defence, falling back while fighting. In urban areas in an offensive role they are no motre, obviously, especially not when the enemy has state of the art ATGM, mines, drones.

That lesson everybody can learn in SBP since 2006 when it was released. In hardly any other sim you can get killed so easily and not even knowing why, what, from where.

Every monkey can point and fire an RPG/PZF style weapon. And every tank'S additionally armoured underbelly can be defeated by a mine if simpy placing a bigger mine.

That the Russian tactical leadership seems to suck, obviosuly, does not make it better. This is what surprises me more than anything: their leadership incompetence, and lacking skill to orchestrate combined arms, inclusive air power. Some pages before I posted about the Ukrainian army big boss. What a difference he made by having radically turned his back on Sovjet era dogma and tactics and handing responsibility over to the field commanders in place, and copying Western procedures! The Russians porobanyl expected to meet an enemy they know well by their own drill, instead they ran into an enemy that has little in common with them and in principle is a Western fighting power. Also, the Ukrianians mostly are nattle-hardned after 8 years of war, while most of the Russians are young unexperienced conscripts.

What remains of the fear of the mighty Russian army is just this: they are still the artillery-heavy army they always were famous and feared for, from plenty of heavy shell and missile artillery on brigade and division level down to small rockets aplenty on company and platoon level.

---------------

Ukraine sources say by their estimations the Russians have lost 40% of their units. If true, that is a nightmare and a humiliation for Russia.

[mapuc]

^^ I guess you right when it comes to tanks driven by a human-I foresee a future where the tanks is about 1/3 of the size of todays mbt-The Abram and is unmanned.

Markus

[Skybird]

Automatted turrets are a first step in that direction. The Russian Armata tank has no crew in the turret. The crew is three and sits side by side, like in a truck's front bench, in the lowered hull.

In the long run, remote controleld drones or autonomous drones will take over, in the air, on land, and also on and under the seas. It spredicted since my school years already, but it takes much longer than was initially suggested. But it will happen.

The second line will always be formed by humans, however, becasue no platform is a sautonomosu and self-adapting has the Autonomous Human Platform MK-I.

[Skybird]

NZZ comments:

https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/geopoliti...den-ld.1674636


Geopolitics is back in Europe - and forcing the EU to reinvent itself

Moscow's invasion of Ukraine has made it clear: Europe's foreign policy must be more than enlargement policy. The return of hard power politics demands pragmatism and efficiency.

On September 11, 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush ("Bush Father") spoke for the first time before Congress in Washington of the dawn of a "new world order." This marked the beginning of what political scientists today call the unipolar moment. The thirty-year global dominance of the United States.

The non-violent decline of the Soviet Union had heralded the epoch. It passed its peak in the mid-noughties, when the Iraq War slipped away from the United States. Then the decline accelerated with the financial crisis of 2008, the end of the Arab Spring and the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2021. The abrupt end was marked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

To some observers, the new era is reminiscent of pre-World War I Europe. Back then, established and emerging powers formed rival alliances with Britain, France and Germany as anchor points. It was an order in which one's gain was always interpreted as another's loss: Politics as a zero-sum game.

More recently, a then-common school of thought has become more attractive again: geopolitics.

Geopolitics has a rather bad reputation in intellectual history, at least its German traditional strand. The concept emerged toward the end of the 19th century in close connection with a Darwinian view of history that propagates the right of the strongest. It sees peoples in an eternal struggle for supremacy and for "living space." A few decades later, Nazi Germany used this poisoned concept to justify its wars of conquest and extermination.

In the United States, a more abstract variant of geopolitical thinking developed and entered political science. It deals with the interrelation of geography and politics and draws conclusions for the relations between states in the "international system." At its core, it is concerned with how economic and military power are distributed in space. Indeed, this is how the global structures of international relations are formed.

It was two European migrants, Henry Kissinger of Germany and Zbigniew Brzezinski of Poland, who as advisors translated this school of thought, called "realist," into policy during the Cold War. The central role is played by the Eurasian continent, the vast landmass where 5 billion people now produce two-thirds of the world's gross national product. Eurasia, Brzezinski said in the 1990s, would continue to be the chessboard on which the struggle for global dominance would be fought.

Even after the demise of the Soviet Union, Kissinger was convinced that Russia would continue to play a decisive role because of its location in this "geopolitical heartland" and its imperial past. Like other representatives of the realist school, he saw early on that Ukraine would be the place where the Western sphere of interest would collide with that of Russia.

The country, he concluded, should therefore become neither the outpost of one power nor that of the other - otherwise it would be destroyed. Geography as destiny? Not quite, since the invasion of Ukraine is, after all, the act of an imperialist tyrant and is not simply dictated by its location. But the many conflicts in and around Ukraine, the dispute over its eastward or westward orientation, showed over many years that there is a dangerous geopolitical fracture here.

After the end of the Cold War, liberals rejected thinking in terms of power blocs, balances and buffer zones as outdated and unethical. They preferred to think of the common "House of Europe" from Lisbon to Vladivostok, which was to be based on common rules and values. The liberal social model seemed universally transferable. Only in retrospect does it become really clear that this vision was only possible as long as the USA kept its competitors in check.

How was this order undermined? And what comes next? Most obvious is the rise of China, which is growing into a fierce competitor to the United States. But for American political scientist John Mearsheimer, the end of the unipolar world is also inherent in its own contradictions: Overstretching, overtaxing and also overconfidence ushered in the end. The hegemon overestimated its ability to export its own values and to reconstruct states worldwide in its own image.

Resistance to this encroachment, whether nationalistically or religiously motivated, led to a series of bitter defeats. For example, attempts to win the war on terror with regime change and state-building failed. The Iraq war in particular became a turning point after 2005 and a disaster for the country and the region.

Around the same time, it became apparent that the intervention in Afghanistan had driven the Taliban from power but had not defeated them. Last year's traumatic withdrawal only confirmed that. In Syria and Libya, too, attempts to bring about a pro-Western transition of power failed. These countries are now destroyed. The threat posed by the Islamic State has been contained, but not banished.

A decade earlier, the Americans had successfully ended the Yugoslav wars, but 140,000 people had died there before that. The EU failed to build a stable, high-growth postwar order in the region over the next 20 years. In contrast, in East-Central Europe, the Baltics and the Black Sea, NATO and EU enlargement progressed successfully. It was not an imperial project, but was absolutely wanted by the countries under former Soviet rule. Here, U.S. and EU soft power was transformed into security and relative prosperity.

What comes next? For Mearsheimer, things are clear. A world is emerging dominated by two superpowers, the U.S. and China, surrounded by a ring of allies. Unlike during the Cold War, however, these blocs continue to cultivate economic exchanges. What will Russia's role be? A junior partner of China or its vassal? Will it democratize after Putin, or will the giant empire disintegrate? Almost anything seems possible now.

The EU, that "sleeping giant," should wake up now. With a share of 25 percent of global economic output, it certainly has what it takes to become a serious geostrategic player. But to do so, it must be able to defend itself independently. Higher military spending is not enough. It is much more important to finally coordinate defense between the countries. Europe does not need two dozen pocket-sized superpower armies, but European armed forces in alliance with the USA.

The EU must now also define its external borders. Vague promises of accession that do not lead to decisive steps towards integration are dangerous in the new age. Ukraine is now tragically experiencing this. In 2012, four years after NATO, the EU gave it an "accession perspective" that was never really serious. Brussels and its capitals entered into a great power competition with Russia with nothing in their hands but an enlargement policy that had already failed in the Balkans.

This strategy could work even less in Ukraine, a post-Soviet state with huge structural problems. New forms of connectivity are therefore necessary, flanked by security policy.

In the new geopolitical situation, the EU must be able to offer something to countries that are not ready for accession but are willing to join. This applies not only to Ukraine, but also to the six Western Balkan states. Otherwise, there is a real danger that the convulsions on the eastern periphery will be perpetuated there. The current crisis dramatically demonstrates that the "multi-speed Europe" needs to be thought of in much more fundamental terms.

In the new era, not only space but also time has become more important again. In order to become capable of action, a security policy-integrated "core Europe" should be created in which the participating states can decide quickly. Because what is needed now is adaptability: Only when the EU understands that geopolitics with its hard rules is back can it hold its own in the new world.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Zelensky recently said in an adress to European heads of states that the Ukraine "has now understood that it cannot be a member of NATO" (mind you, two years ago they wrote NATO membership as a goal into the Ukrainian constitution). That is last but not least a message and concession adressed at Moscow, indicating readiness to negotiate about that. For years the Ukraine was encouraged to nevertheless think it had a "perspective", same regarding EU membership. Europe is not without guilt in the current desaster. It encouraged the Ukraine to take an additionally provocative posture.

All the more unbearable, then, is the blasé, arrogant propaganda speak of von der Leyen and her ilk who still drive their ideology-heavy businesses as usual. As long as such empty-headed idiots and speech automatons focused on their own appearance lead the EU deeper and deeper into madness, nothing better will ever come of it. Europea's worst enemy is not even Putin, or China, but the EU and its bigwigs and top kings themselves. The EU doe snot prioivde the big solutions to the bog probelms, but its very existence, as it is today, defines the basic fundament of the main problem.



A free trade zone. 3% (!) defence budgets of all members. No shared currency. NATO resurrected, within NATO Europe taking more and more capabilties from the Americans who focus more on the Pacific. Not more, not less I want. This gets my vote, and only this. But they still babble all-ideology goals and cultural revolution and re-education and mass-drills for the plebs to get wanted ideology-dripping wordviews into unwilling heads. For this I always will only wish the EU: its destruction, so to make room for a new construction that is more down to the ground, more realistic, less-ideology-drunk, left and woke.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by tmccarthy

It sounded like 30mm autocannon to me. Otherwise could only assume it's fairly modern because of the video targeting screen. I did notice the soldiers in the back and was sorry to see that they may have been killed and at least the 3 crew members inside were almost certainly killed.

Answered previously here:https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/sho...postcount=2262

[Jimbuna]

Quite an interesting take on the situation.

Vladimir Putin Has Fallen Into the Dictator Trap

In the span of a couple of weeks, Vladimir Putin—a man recently described by Donald Trump as a strategic “genius”—managed to revitalize NATO, unify a splintered West, turn Ukraine’s little-known president into a global hero, wreck Russia’s economy, and solidify his legacy as a murderous war criminal.

How did he miscalculate so badly?
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/edito...out&li=AAnZ9Ug

[Jimbuna]

Russia sanctions Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and others

Russia's foreign ministry says it has imposed sanctions on US President Joe Biden and 12 other US officials.

The list includes Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, press secretary Jen Psaki and other members of the administration.

But it also includes two surprises: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mr Biden's son Hunter.

The measures block their entry into Russia and freeze any assets held in the country.

However, the ministry has said the sanctions will not impede necessary high-level contacts for the affected individuals.

Other names on the list are:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan
Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh
US Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Samantha Power
Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo
President of the Export-Import Bank of the US Reta Jo Lewis
The ministry has said it is applying sanctions "on the basis of reciprocity".

Russia is now the most sanctioned country in the world.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-60754136

[Jimbuna]

President Volodymyr Zelenksy repeats his plea for a no-fly zone over Ukraine and calls for more sanctions on Russia in an address to US Congress.

US President Biden is expected to announce $800 million of military aid after Zelensky's speech by videolink.

Kyiv officials say Russian forces shelled an apartment block on Wednesday morning, as the city imposes a curfew during "a dangerous moment"

The US embassy in Ukraine says Russian forces shot and killed 10 people standing in line for bread in the northern city of Chernihiv.

Meanwhile, Russian troops are still holding 400 people, including doctors and patients, "like hostages" inside a hospital in Mariupol, the deputy mayor says.

Zelensky says peace talks with Russia are beginning to "sound more realistic"

Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak says there are "fundamental contradictions" during the talks but "certainly room for compromise"

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Quite an interesting take on the situation.

“How did he miscalculate so badly”, are they kidding? It’s an interesting take alright when some are already talking like it’s over when Russian troops are still in Ukraine. From what I’m seeing things are far from over and appear to still be escalating.

Let’s keep on mind Putin did make it very clear he had considered all possibilities and was prepared for them. Not only do I think that referred to the use of WMD but sanctions as well.

[mapuc]

As the title of the article said in the Danish newspaper
(Part of it-behind paywall)

Can Putin withdraw from Ukraine without losing face ?

Markus

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

“How did he miscalculate so badly”, are they kidding? It’s an interesting take alright when some are already talking like it’s over when Russian troops are still in Ukraine. From what I’m seeing things are far from over and appear to still be escalating.

Let’s keep on mind Putin did make it very clear he had considered all possibilities and was prepared for them. Not only do I think that referred to the use of WMD but sanctions as well.

On a personal note, I'm hoping he gets taken down from within but the other side of me worries how much damage he will create before that happens.

[Jimbuna]

Ukraine: Putin will search for a way to save face.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60756993