Anyone else find the music soundtrack to this clip haunting? Most clips are some generic metal, but this one is quite affecting.
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Mud season. Just imagine these conditions overnight in below freezing temperatures…
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Very interesting report that Russia is replacing nuclear warheads with ballast.
“Russia almost certainly hopes such missiles will function as decoys and divert Ukrainian air defenses”.
From UK Defence Intelligence ,“almost certainly” is standardized “Words of Estimative Probability” corresponding to 95% likelihood.
If the assessment is about the function of those missiles when launched it may or may not be accurate.
But either way I doubt that it is an accurate assessment of what it claims to be assessing - the intent behind this improvisation and what it highlights.
Replacing nuclear warheads with ballast does not just highlight “the level of depletion in Russia’s stock of long range missiles”. It highlights that the urgency with which they being expended exceeds the capability to quickly replace a nuclear warhead with a high explosive warhead or a decoy warhead.
My wildly speculative guesses re explanation for this urgency, if the use of ballast is confirmed, would be:
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The 1980s ALCMs are completely useless as nuclear delivery systems so depleting them is not an issue, whereas the alternative would have been more use of long range SAMs that are likely to be needed for their designed purpose in Air Defense.
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Orders have been issued to keep up a rate of attack on Ukrainian infrastructure and reduce the rate of failures with much higher priority than any economy of force concerns. Throwing ballast instead of decoy or high explosive warheads is a bit like throwing untrained mobniks into front lines - desperate efforts to be doing something while they are absorbing the first couple of hundred thousand newly mobilized.
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Such orders may reflect the largely “public relations” purpose of the infrastructure attacks - demonstrating “resolve” to their base to counter despair and defeatism after major failures. They don’t care, and may welcome, that it also demonstrates barbarity.
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That demonstration of resolve may be far more urgently needed now than stocks of long range cruise missiles later. When they have reconstituted more trained forces in a few months it will still be an artillery positional war, not a long range cruise missile war and they will still be on the defensive, not attempting highly mobile offensives. They still have large stocks of artillery and a munitions industry that can produce shells for it.
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Strategic orientation is still just to hold on and “not lose” in the hope that something will turn up.
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Valid thoughts.
My take is this is like the S-300 missiles being used in ground attack mode. It isn’t very good, but they have them on the shelf. When all the other shelves are starting to get a bit bare, then throwing the kitchen sink at the enemy starts to happen.
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My para 1 re alternative being more use of long range SAMs was referring to the S-300s.
But my speculation is that it is not so much throwing kitchen sink at the enemy as a demonstration for their own supporters that they are doing something more than throwing untrained mobniks at the enemy.
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Luck I would say; but if you have lots of tracers, you could adjust your aim but there’s not much time to adjust fire for a missile like that.
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yes, it is.
Don’t know much about regional music but seems sort of Turkish / Georgian
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While l find that harrowing, it would be quite unnerving to conscripts if played back to them. This guy is one of the lucky ones. I hope there are more like him who manage to escape by giving up. It sounds like the UKA has developed a protocol for their drones to recognize those who don’t want to continue fighting. Poor bastard, getting kicked out of his trench.
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More tea Mr Makej? No thanks. This one tastes a little strange.
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We’ll come and check out the view from this window - you can see Kherson from it.
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One Russian speaker by the name of Zelensky comes to mind.
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Yes, Russian is his first language. If ethnicity is defined by first language alone, he would be ethnic Russian, but it’s complicated by also being Jewish.
Anecdotal, but a friend born in Iran to a German father and Russian mother doesn’t identify with either and is anti Russian Orthodox ( to which her mother adhered)
Was he recently critical of Putin?
If so it might help to explain his sudden demise.
There is a lot of that going around the Kremlin these days.
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One down in Belarus already.
Another in the cross hairs…
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Hey Taojas are these Ukraine or Russian troops?
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