TheOldGuy @TheOldGuy@qoto.org
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian Z fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2992. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
More on the stabbings in Australia.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/13/man-shot-multiple-people-stabbed-sydney-australia/
Stabbing in Australia. Seven dead counting the stabbed. Imagine how bad it could have been if they had not outlawed semi-automatic weapons
❗️The SBUprevented an attempt on the head of the Kherson OVA Oleksandr Prokudin. The suspect is a resident of Kherson, he has already been detained.
The attempt was prepared in cooperation with the Russian special services. According to the SBU, the Russians launched the drone from a distance of 12 km, and the Kherson native adjusted fire on Prokudin's car on the spot. The drone was shot down in time.
▪️ Oleksandr Prokudin is the head of Kherson OVA from February 7, 2023. Before that, he worked in law enforcement agencies.
Photo: Ukrinform
@ukrainejournal
France is restoring an Ammo Factory - CAESER Howitzer Shells
France reopened a factory dating back to the First World War. The president of the country, Emmanuel Macron, also visited the construction site.
The official calls for the rapid increase of military capabilities against the background of Russian aggression and are helping Ukraine with more artillery shells for the CAESAR howitzer, Macron says it's time for geostrategic changes.
@ukrainejournal
Kazakhstan adopted a law on domestic violence
The Senate of Kazakhstan in two readings immediately adopted a law on ensuring the rights of women and the safety of children. It is also called the Domestic and Domestic Violence Act.
Now, for causing minor harm to health, the aggressor faces a fine of approximately $1,650, arrest for 50 days, or community service. For assault of moderate severity and causing serious harm to health in the family, imprisonment is implied. Murder, rape and sexual assault against a child are punishable by life imprisonment.
The reason for the adoption of the law was the high-profile case of former minister Kuandyk Bishimbayev, who brutally murdered his wife Saltanat Nukenova. According to witnesses, before the murder, Bishimbayev regularly beat his wife.
In 2017, Putin signed a law according to which violence within the family was removed from the Criminal Code. According to the current "laws" violent abusers only face administrative liability.
@freerussia_report
“Heroes of the war” are a threat not only to family and neighbors. Men returning from the front and corrupted by big money can become dangerous for the regime. - Abbas Gallyamov for MO
Soldiers returning to a country where the economy is rapidly deteriorating, may begin to spill out their discontent and aggression also on the ungrateful regime.
So far, the topic of the return of the soldiers from the front is discussed exclusively in relation to the problems that they bring to the average person. The rapes and murders committed by demobilized Wagner mercenaries are so shocking that other aspects of the issue are lost behind them.
But currently the regime is corrupting men with a lot of money that it pays them for fighting in the war, and what will they get after returning to civilian life? Work for a salary 10-20 times less than they are used to? And this against the backdrop of their conceited self-importance and inflated ambitions? At the moment this people are getting used to the idea that they are the "new elite", literally "holding the nation together".
They genuinely believe that they are worthy of the money they receive and will not like the decline in living standards. No supply can meet this demand. After all, the economy is degrading.
In general, the "heroes" who have returned from the front will have lots of reasons for dissatisfaction. The old money will run out, and there will be no new one. They will not show any respect for law enforcement officers. All these riot police, all these investigators are "rear rats" for them, who "haven't smell gunpowder".
The main thing: people do not like to return to poverty. Eric Hoffer called the "new poor" the most important component of the revolutionary class: "This class has retained a vivid memory of its former wealth and power, and it is unlikely that it will voluntarily reconcile itself to the deterioration of the living conditions of the <... >The memory of better times burns their hearts."
And hard days will come, sooner or later. In such a situation, front-line soldiers disappointed by the ingratitude of the system can have their say. If they join the protest, whatever form it has taken by then, they will radically intensify it.
Read more (Russian) or (English translated)
@freerussia_report
The assistant to a deputy who beat his wife was detained in Cheboksary
The video published by the channel “Cheboksary Auto News from ZR” shows how Markel Egorov, an assistant to Chuvashia State Council deputy from the LDPR, Konstantin Stepanov, forcibly drags a woman along the ground by her hair and pushes her into a car.
A few hours after the video was published, Egorov was detained. He attributed his behavior to “family conflict.” The injured woman also came to the police station on her own.
At the same time nothing will happen to him, as Putin de-criminalized violence in the family per decree in 2017, so it is now only a pure administrative offense, which at the most will be settled with a fine.
@freerussia_report
Good morning Resisters everywhere. It's 46⁰ right now but supposed to reach 80⁰ today.
Boris Johnson called on the West to urgently provide assistance to Ukraine
"If the war in Ukraine ends in a catastrophe, it will happen for only one reason - because of the inaction of the West. Every month we wait is a month when more Ukrainian children fall under the bombs and die. Every week during which we do not do the obvious - we do not give the Ukrainians the weapons they need - is a week during which Putin moves closer to his heinous goal - to torture a European country to death. Every day, the pressure on Ukrainians increases - and yet the decision is in our hands. We know what to do. We've done it before and we can easily do it again," Johnson emphasizes.
https://t.me/EveryUkraineWarVideo Subscribe
CONTINUED (3/3)
We’re already seeing evidence of a shortfall: Russian troops riding into battle in unarmored freight trucks and even open-top golf carts that the Kremlin purchased from a Chinese company.
It should go without saying that golf carts don’t last long in combat with, say, Ukraine’s angriest anti-tank missile teams and most skilled drone operators. It doesn’t matter if the Russian army in Ukraine has 300,000 or 400,000 people if those people utterly lack protection on the battlefield.
The fragility of Russia’s army might be more evident if Ukraine’s own army weren’t starving for ammo and, at times, incapable of shooting back. When Ukraine’s 2023 offensive petered out late last year after achieving modest gains, Russia seized the initiative—and went on the attack all along the front line.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for the Ukrainians. At almost exactly the same moment in mid-October, Speaker of the House Johnson refused to bring to a vote the $60 billion in fresh funding U.S. president Joe Biden had proposed for Ukraine.
Johnson is a close ally of former president Donald Trump, who was impeached in 2019 for attempting to coerce Ukrainian officials to support a smear campaign targeting Trump’s political opponents. Trump has since called on Ukraine to surrender portions of its territory to Russia.
Deprived of the hundreds of thousands of artillery shells and thousands of surface-to-air missiles that Biden had hoped to buy for them, Ukrainian forces have had to make hard choices: retreating from positions that, with enough firepower, they might have held.
A 2,000-person Ukrainian garrison quit the city of Avdiivka in mid-February after inflicting tens of thousands of casualties on the attacking Russians—and then running out of ammo. Now another 2,000-person Ukrainian garrison faces the same terrible dilemma in the canal district of Chasiv Yar.
At the same time, Ukraine’s best air defense batteries have fallen silent for a want of American-made missiles. Ukraine’s biggest cities—Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa—are increasingly defenseless as more Russian missiles and bombs pummel them.
Six hundred Ukrainian civilians, including children, died in air raids in March. A missile raid on Kyiv last night destroyed the city’s biggest power plant, casting thousands of homes, and vital weapons workshops, into darkness. “More air defense, and our assistance, is needed now,” Bridget Brink, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, pleaded yesterday.
Ukrainian troops are losing ground, but they’re losing ground to legions of poorly-trained Russian troops riding in antique vehicles. They’re losing ground only because they’re running out of ammo. Ukrainians’ “ability to defend their terrain that they currently hold and their air space would fade rapidly—will fade rapidly—without ... continued U.S. support,” Cavoli said.
Conversely, with U.S. support, a rearmed Ukrainian military could protect its cities from Russian raids and, on the front line, achieve firepower superiority over a Russian military that’s fast running out of modern weapons.
The choice, tragically, isn’t the Ukrainians’ to make. It’s up to one man, an American. The leader of a thin Republican majority in one house of the U.S. Congress.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, for one, understands the politics and the stakes. “If Ukraine's partners act decisively, I am confident that we can defeat Russian terror before it spreads further,” Zelensky wrote today."
Note: In the above article Forbes appear to make use of fairly optimistic numbers. Estimates of how long Ruzzia can draw on old stock vary, with 18-24 months also mentioned by analysts as a "moderate" forecast.
The Ukrainians defeat most Russian attacks, inflicting catastrophic casualties on increasingly under-equipped Russian assault groups.
But the Russians keep coming, and keep gaining ground. And the one person who can stop them—Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Mike Johnson—so far has refused to do so.
All Johnson has to do is bring to a vote an overwhelmingly popular bill that would send $60 billion in aid to Ukraine. Aid that would pay for the ammunition Ukrainian forces need to hold off Russian forces until the Russians finally deplete their reserves of old Cold War weapons.
In 26 months of hard fighting, the Russian military has lost 15,300 tanks, fighting vehicles, howitzers and other weapons in Ukraine, along with hundreds of thousands of troops. The Ukrainian military’s own losses are a third as heavy.
And yet the Russian force in Ukraine is bigger than ever. “The army is actually now larger—by 15 percent—than it was when it invaded Ukraine,” U.S. Army general Christopher Cavoli, NATO's top commander, told the House Armed Services Committee. “Over the past year, Russia increased its front-line troop strength from 360,000 to 470,000.”
That’s possible only because the Kremlin drafted more than 300,000 men starting in late 2022 in addition to increasing bonuses for volunteers. At the same time, Russian brigades have curtailed basic training for new recruits in order to speed fresh forces to the front.
But these unprepared new recruits don’t survive very long on the front line. Lately, between 800 and a thousand Russians have been dying every in the wider war, according to the Ukrainian defense ministry.
Russian soldiers die as fast as they arrive in Ukraine. The Estonian defense ministry concluded, in one recent study, that killing 100,000 Russians this year would permanently damage, if not collapse, the Kremlin’s mobilization effort.
Ukraine is on track to kill 300,000 Russians this year. It isn’t sustainable.
Nor are Russia’s vehicle losses sustainable. Russian industry produces 500 or 600 new tanks and maybe a little more than a thousand new fighting vehicles every year. The Russian military loses more than a thousand tanks and close to 2,000 fighting vehicles every year—and the loss rate is increasing.
There’s a gap—one the Kremlin fills by pulling out of long-term storage tanks and fighting vehicles dating back to the 1970s, or even the ’60s or ’50s in some cases. But these old vehicles are a finite resource. Built during the Soviet Union’s industrial heyday, they cannot be replaced with new production.
Ominously for the Russians, the most recent projections anticipate that, as early as mid-2025, there won’t be any more old tanks and fighting vehicles left in storage. “Time is running out for Russia,” wrote Artur Rehi, an Estonian solder and analyst.
CONTINUES (2/3)
The Clock Is Ticking: Russia Has A One-Year Reserve Of Weapons - Forbes
"As Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its third year, three main dynamics are shaping the battlefield.
First: Russia is fully mobilized—politically, industrially and militarily. But this mobilization is depleting resources the Kremlin can’t renew. Most importantly, stocks of old Cold War-vintage weapons.
In other words, Russia is strong, but fragile.
Second: Ukraine is mobilizing, too, but it still relies on foreign aid to meet urgent financial and military needs—and Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are withholding a decisive portion of that aid.
Third: Ukrainian tactics are superior to Russian tactics, helping Ukrainian formations to defeat much larger Russian formations. But tactics are irrelevant when and where Ukrainian forces simply run out of ammunition.
The interplay of these three dynamics explains the seeming contradictions that are evident every day along the 600-mile front line of the wider war.
CONTINUES (1/3)
⚡️ Great Britain will probably send its DragonFire laser weapon to Ukraine: it can shoot down UAVs, - The Telegraph.
London plans to introduce this new weapon into its army by 2027. But its prototypes may end up in Ukraine even earlier, said British Defense Minister Grant Shapps.
"There is a live conflict going on in Europe right now, and we have a unique modern weapon to solve it, which can be useful," Shapps said.
A special feature of DragonFire is its cheapness - the declared cost is 10 pounds (490 UAH) per shot.
This is really a product for years to come, says Shapps.
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian Z fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2992. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
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