Not gonna link directly to the story, cause it’s fox, but look at this headline…
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Ooops. I had to Google It. 
Yes, some experts are joking the next Russian step Will be taking all the T34 and Katyusha from war museums. But in the other hand, they have plenty of ammo, while the Ukrainian army is almost out of artillery shells.
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IIRC NATO governments decided that supplying planes to Ukraine was not possible. If foreign pilots flew them to Ukraine, Russia would treat their home country is a party to the war. If Ukrainian pilots collected them in a foreign country, Russia would treat that country as a party to the war.
Allegedly some Soviet-built planes have been dismantled and delivered as spare parts.
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Not to be a pedantic contrarian, but what if they were dissasembled, put on a train or ten, and shipped and reassembled in western Ukraine… time to readiness is reduced, but they certainly can’t claim more offense than they could with the artillery that’s been shipped in?
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It doesn’t have to be that complex. Re-paint the MiG-29s in Ukrainian livery, re-programme the transponders, strip or swap out ID elements, use distractions while they make the short flight over the border, and whaddya know, Ukraine “found” some spare aircraft they’d “forgotten about”.
To be honest, I suspect this kind of smurfing in of individual planes is already going on quietly. It’s a little risky but despite the bluster Putin currently isn’t looking for excuses to further over-extend his military.
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Guardian liveblog a few hours ago.
Ukraine has established two routes through Poland and Romania to export grain and avert a global food crisis although bottlenecks have slowed the supply chain, Kyiv’s deputy foreign minister said on Sunday.
Dmytro Senik said global food security was at risk because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had halted Kyiv’s Black Sea grain exports, causing widespread shortages and soaring prices, Reuters reported.
Ukraine is the world’s fourth-largest grain exporter and it says there are some 30 million tonnes of grain stored in Ukrainian-held territory which it is trying to export via road, river and rail.
Ukraine was in talks with Baltic states to add a third corridor for food exports, Senik said.
He did not give details on how much grain has already moved or would be moved through these routes.
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People have short memories.
Ukraine was preparing for a potential invasion because they aren’t idiots. But also gearing up to push back on the invasion that had already happened. Not the full scale, nation wide one that ended up happening in February.
At the end of last year and early this year Ukrainian leaders were routinely dismissing the possibility of a Russian invasion. It’s been widely reported and documented that they were doing this even behind closed doors.
This is also true of a lot of NATO nations.
The US’s detailed intelligence releases, with dates and everything, put out in the lead up were broadly criticized as hawkish pessimism in the media. Especially after dates changed a couple times.
In the end they called nearly to the hour. And the next couple of weeks were loaded with “how did US intelligence get it so right”, unpickings of how everyone else got it wrong. And high fives over how just releasing all the intelligence undercut Russian justifications.
IIRC even the Ukrainians acknowledged they’d been too optimistic/dismissive. And there was a lot of acrimony over what might have happened if NATO geared up before hand like the US was pushing for.
This all happened just months ago. Use the Google search tools to cap results at Feb 1, you’ll see plenty of confirmation.
Kind of a shitty way to put it. But he’s not confused or making shit up.
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In the Future,™ all the gatekeepers of knowledge will be overthrown and everyone will be an expert on everything
especially former aspiring rock stars
and former aspiring New Age gurus
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Perhaps we should call it “Ukraïna” like they do
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Their logo looks a lot like that of Mos Burger, which is a major burger chain in Japan.
See for yourself.
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They’ve used “Moy Burger” (My Burger) as a “temporary name” for the app. From a Guardian article I posted a few days ago:
According to reports from Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency, the McDonald’s app in Russia has been renamed as “My Burger”. The agency was informed that this was a temporary name, to comply with the requirement to remove the McDonald’s brand.
Perhaps they realised that “Moy Burger” plus the logo would earn them a nastygram from MOS Burger’s lawyers.
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Yep. I assumed it was self-interest on the part of the US. It’s not exactly a reliable source of information but they were dead right, and publicly dead right (as in we assume some times they know a lot more than they say, and some of the times they are dead wrong they knew that they were when they said it.)
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No, but it does need some semblance of brain science - which is in short supply, like everything else, in Russia at present.
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Everyone did. Cause everyone else with an eye on the intelligence was saying the situation was calming down.
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In the late 1990s I flew from Mexico to Havana on a Il-62 operated by Cubana airlines. It was the most frightening flying experience of my life. The plane rattled the entire way, the row of seats was not completely bolted down and so rocked back and forth when the plane took off or changed altitude, the seatback would not stay in place, the tray table was held up by tape, and there were any number of loose parts noticeable from my seat.
I vowed never to fly on a Russian-made or Cuban operated place ever again. I was in Havana in May 2018 with a group who wanted to fly to Santa Clara. The day before I was set to drive them (because I absolutely refused to fly a domestic flight) Cubana Flight 972 went down. [An older-model 737, but still].
No Russian-built, Russian-operated, Russian-maintained planes, ever. No matter what.
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So Putin has no qualms about invading Ukraine and threatening to use tactical nukes, but he doesn’t dare cross McDonalds’ trademark lawyers? New plan: have McDonalds trademark the hammer and sickle, and release a Happy Meal toy that looks suspiciously like the Kremlin.
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It is a private company. McDonald’s chose to leave Russia and sold their Russian business to Alexander Govor, who ran 25 franchised branches in Siberia.
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I mean, go for it. I suspect such a program would generate lots of donations.
But I am looking at it from a war effort standpoint: what is the best to help Ukraine?
The problem with donating 200,000 random ARs from closets is you have no uniformity and a ton of questionable specs. You would want to make sure such a program would be an asset not a liability.
I guess have all of them go through US Army armorers’ hands to check for parts in spec and confirm zero, and then you would have an asset. But given the time and cost of that, stockpiles of M4s and M16s they plan to replace over the next 10 years anyway would be immediately available and allow NATO countries to supply 5.56mm in bulk.
Yes, artillery really is what wins wars. I know those large ones we sent over are the bees knees, except we aren’t sending them the full technical package which allows for the shell types that have fins and can guide themselves super accurately to targets. So, more artillery, and more shells. They will have to have them respond to Russian shelling.
Yes, that was the conclusion they had. But things may change if this war drags out longer. The training and the like could be done in secret as not to alarm anyone, and make such a change in policy possible.
Russia has repeatedly made threats and backed down, so it is a poker game to see how much they are willing to risk on their hand. They made comments about Finland and Sweden joining NATO wouldn’t be acceptable, and now they are like, “It isn’t a problem.”
I honestly think that NATO is playing this war like a huge balance beam. At any point they could slam weight on one side and “win”, but doing so would make Russia freak out and act rash. If you slowly trickle weight on one side, allowing it to slowly tip, the result seems to be a natural part of the war. There is no catalyst for acting rash.
We have seen it time and again where NATO will say they won’t do something, give it time for the idea to become possible, and then quietly do that thing. Trickling out more and more.
“Da, da, da, daaa, you better love it!”
RE: Wheat.
Spent the last week at my parents with the kiddo and driving on dirt roads got to see fields of winter wheat ready for harvest. (Go ahead and hum Sting’s “Fields of Gold” here.) The problem is that it has been really wet in the region, which means 1) its is hard to harvest, and 2) when you harvest it the moisture content is too high. It will have to be dried out which is costly and time consuming, and if not done right, you get mold or grain sprouting in the silos. And what is worse, western Kansas has been too dry and their wheat crop is supposed to be a little over half of what it should be in some areas.
Oh and the storms with high wind or hail will beat the wheat to shit and lay it down, making it harder to harvest and knocking the wheat kernels to the ground.
What a shitty time to have a meh crop come in.
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Useful thread on Russian and Ukrainian history and why Russians don’t think of Ukraine as a separate country.
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