I’m going to state a couple of facts.
- Russian GDP in 2021 on an exchange rate basis was about 1.71 Trillion dollars
- Russian GDP in 2021 on a Purchasing Power Parity basis was about $2.6 Trillion dollars.
- Depending on how we do our calculations, Russia’s daily GDP is between $4.7 to $7.1 Billion
- Russia’s 2021 military budget was about $42 billion dollars for the year
Let’s keep that in mind when we look at the following viral tweet.
Given the previous facts, is $20 billion dollars per day even in the plausible realm of reality? That is 2 to 4 times daily Russian GDP or 50% of the annual defense budget.
Is that $20 billion per day estimate plausible?
I don’t think so.
UPDATE 1 The 20 billion in the original document was RUBLES not DOLLARS. The math then is extremely plausible. My apologies. I stand by the rest.
Everyone is looking for information. I am looking for information. Just be careful about what information and who is reporting and analyzing what.
- Look for people who have been thinking long and hard about particular problems for years or decades instead of a few hours, days or weeks on Google or Youtube.
- Look for people who aren’t routinely experts of the week on whatever is in the news
- Don’t look at pundits who are expected to be a mile wide and a millimeter deep.
- Look for people who have specific subject area expertise.
- Look for people who have gotten major questions right in the past.
- Look for people who are very well aware of the limits of their knowledge and can flag when they are switching from analysis to opinion.
- Look for people who are capable of saying “I don’t know” and “I was wrong about X for these reasons…”
- Look for people whose numbers are in the realm of plausibility.
This applies to the invasion of Ukraine.
This applies to COVID and public health measures.
This applies to almost everything.
Finding legitimate expertise is challenging. It is tough. The sudden spike of sustained public interest in a field that typically has a small cluster of practitioners and professionals speaking only with themselves to a massive opportunity space for grifters and cranks and enthusiastic amateurs (all non-mutually exclusive) to fill with incredible information and story telling.
Be careful about the information environment out there. It is ugly.
Tado Pupdate Part II: 2 Tado 2 Pupdate!
Ksmiami
Tom Nichols. Now and he filters information sources on his feed.
David Anderson
@Ksmiami: Adam
The Dangerman
Speaking of ugly and bullshit, is it me or has that former guy with the ferret hair been strangely quiet for a couple days?
bbleh
The only plausible explanation I can come up with for such an outlandish figure is a sort of comparative-cost estimate, ie what would it cost “in US terms” if it were the US military conducting such an operation.
Also, there is the general problem of innumeracy, among the public and among journalists (who really should know better). It’s the blind leading the blind.
CaseyL
Russia is a mafia state, so I imagine quite a lot of their economic activity isn’t tracked by normal sources. Arms dealers routinely deal with clients who pay in untraceable cash.
Mind you, I don’t know just how wide open the arms bazaar is in terms of what you can buy or in what quantities. But if you have a class of oligarchs who can lay their hands on billions-with-a-b dollars (if not in cash, in bitcoin, say) and you have a class of arms dealers who can provide just about anything short of nuclear weapons, then official estimates may not be trustworthy. (As in, not entirely accurate, not as in lying.)
Ksmiami
@The Dangerman: Fuck him. I hope he croaks. He’s doing some Magat rally tonight. The messages from the Democratic Party s/b we believe in freedom and Democracy- the other guys are Traitors aligned with Putin
West of the Rockies
@The Dangerman:
Difficult to say… his brand new bigly-shiny social media platform is shit, and he embarrassed himself on Fox a couple days ago with such egregious misinformation that the heinous Laura Ingraham corrected him.
West of the Rockies
So, does it seem things are going significantly better for Russia than the above bogus factoids suggest?
Baud
@The Dangerman:
Putin told him he was doing more harm than good for the cause.
H.E.Wolf
The University of Washington is one of many which provide tools for evaluation.
https://guides.lib.uw.edu/research/evaluate
germy
@The Dangerman:
He’s gravely assessing the situation, like Danny DeVito’s Penguin.
Brachiator
@David Anderson:
Very good cautions about wading though the tangle of bad information.
I think someone mentioned that the FT site was letting people read their Ukraine coverage at no charge.
Benw
White men who eat at diners are BY FAR the most informed people in the world.
Scout211
@West of the Rockies:
Double embarrassed because he immediately blamed Ingraham for giving him the wrong information to publicly state on air.
If he is getting his national security information from Fox News talking heads like Laura Ingraham, then he is just a putz on Fox News saying stupid things, not an ex-President with any kind of accurate insider information or wisdom. Whether he is really getting his information from a Fox News host or he just decided to blame her to save face (more likely), it still is a double embarrassment. Either choice makes him look like a putz on Fox News. LOL
Some news articles did report that his current inner circle told him to be quiet right now about Russia and Ukraine, but I don’t think he can stay quiet very long.
Yarrow
@Brachiator: That was me. Here’s the link to the Financial Times Ukraine coverage.
Tim C.
Spanky
Oh man! I saw the post title and thought this was the end of Balloon Juice.
guachi
I saw the tweet thread you reference not but a minute before reading this post.
That 20 billion number jumped out at me too as being completely improbable.
Geminid
@West of the Rockies: The factoids suggest problems for Russia in the medium and long term. In the short term the Russians will fight with what they have on hand.
That may not turn out to be enough. Evidently, the Russians planned on a short war and may have counted on it. They thought they would knock out Ukraine’s military and neutralized it’s leadership by today. If they can’t achieve those goals soon, their munitions production or lack thereof could become critical.
Brachiator
@Scout211:
Even when he was president he was getting his national security information from Fox News. He is, and always will be, a putz.
Jay
@West of the Rockies:
nope.
but there have long been people who use “national” factoids to try to predict “the future”,
They are not all wrong, not all right. Yemen is still there.
There are reports out of Kherson claiming Russian tank columns are stalled, with crews wandering around seeking diesel fuel.
West of the Rockies
@Scout211:
I wonder if Clump is still receiving high-level info from the government. I thought I heard ex presidents recieve briefings. Giving him any such material seems like a national security risk.
Sebastian
General Staff of the Ukrainian Forces in a message to the Ukrainian People:
“ATTENTION: If you see a column of tanks, a convoy of fuel trucks will definitely follow after them. Do whatever is necessary to prevent them from passing. Block the road with large vehicles, tree trunks trees on the road, everything possible – General Staff of Ukraine”
Numerous videos on Twitter and other SM show exactly that. Ukrainians are attacking Russian supply and support, slowing down Russian armor and then destroying them with AT.
Yarrow
@West of the Rockies: I thought Biden shut that down or at least limited what TFG could see.
CraigM
@CaseyL: pretty sure that economic activity isn’t generating revenue available to the state. And the tax-avoiding class has already demonstrated their willingness to free-ride, so coordinating the oligarchs and arms dealers to privately assist the state offensive is unlikely to happen. All that black market economic activity is unlikely to contribute to the invasion effort.
Plus the Russian army doesn’t appear to be especially effective with Russian weapons, undermining the arms merchants sales arguments. If I were them, I’d be pissed at Putin for the underprepared and apparently incompetent demonstration of Russian effectiveness. Merchants of death are still business people with normal capitalist concerns about marketing and profit maximization….
Calouste
@bbleh: Journalists are people who are too bad at math to even succeed at business administration and too bad at logic to even succeed at law.
eclare
@West of the Rockies: Seems like Joe could override that
ETA> I have no knowledge, just a guess.
Spanky
@Jay:
Ah, what a couple of squadrons of A-10s could do!
West of the Rockies
@West of the Rockies:
Maybe they should just give him a child’s paper activity menu like at Denney’s and a box of crayons. Then he can color in pictures of tanks and go, “Vroom, VROOM!”
Brachiator
@Yarrow:
Thanks again for the link.
Baud
@eclare:
But then how would we get false information into Russia?
Scout211
@Yarrow:
@West of the Rockies:
He didn’t get a briefing after January 6th,
20202021 and then (From February 2021 article in NYT) Biden finally officially barred him from the briefings in the future. Source.eclare
@Spanky: Yep….
West of the Rockies
@Spanky:
Make it so, Number One!
Spanky
@West of the Rockies: What they really should do is give him tainted intel, and see how and when the taint gets back to Moscow.
West of the Rockies
@Scout211:
Excellent. And thank you.
eclare
@Scout211: Thanks for the confirmation!
The Dangerman
@Spanky: Highway of Death, Kuwait/Iraq.
Ken
Remember when reading twitter, the blue check mark means that the person whose name is on that account was able to show twitter that… that… that they are the person whose name is on that account.
Soonergrunt
Even at the height of our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were spending $1 billion or so a day, and our way of war is orders of magnitude more expensive than the Russians’.
The Dangerman
@West of the Rockies: I’ve heard stories that A-10s can literally cause Number 2 in targeted ground forces.
Spanky
And don’t get me started on the thought of F-35s filling that roll.
Spanky
Heh!
Jay
Orxy has reported that the Ukrainian National Rail line has destroyed all tracks leading to Russia, Belarus, DPR, LNR and Crimea.
he’s also recording that Russian confirmed losses are coming in faster than he can type.
Calouste
@Soonergrunt:
$20 billion per day on 170,000 troops is $100,000+ per troop per day. That’s epic levels of corruption even by Russian standards.
Spanky
@Jay: “Confirmed losses” by whom? See post title and OP.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Not to mention those same people are quite likely to sell off a lot of the emergency orders for the war.
Cameron
@Jay: Maybe they can join the truckers headed to Washington.
Sebastian
I don’t think that $20bn per day is realistic but you have to consider that wartime and yearly military budget are two different things. In normal years you don’t go through hundreds of cruise missiles per week, each costing at least $1m (Tomahawks are closer to $2m). Nor do you lose two Ilyushin Il-76 in a single day, each around $50m.
An armored personnel carrier like the BTR-80 is $0.5-0.6m each. The Russians lost close to 600 in two days, that’s $300m.
70-100 tanks were destroyed in two days, they are $4m each. So that’s another $200-300m.
An attack helicopter like the Mil-Mi 28 is $15m, the Russians lost a dozen or so? That’s another $200m.
Then there is the loss of specialists. A military pilot training is anywhere from $5-10m, Russians do it probably cheaper. They have lost ~100 so far, give or take. That’s another half billion.
Conclusion from this napkin math: The $20bn are probably way too high by an order of magnitude, but we are easily in the $2bn per day region if these losses keep up.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Calouste: I wonder if the 20 billion number is the Russian estimate for the total cost of the war plus occupation.
Mike E
ESPN+ has a STOP WAR banner prominent in their soccer match coverage. Poland have refused to play Russia in their March 24 match there.
Yarrow
This made me laugh.
trollhattan
@Calouste:
I recall during the good old days of our twin wars–Iraq and Afghanistan–the cash burn rate for each soldier in Afghanistan was enormous due to so much coming either by air or over the mountains from Pakistan by truck, and our good buddies Pakistan were gouging the hell out of us for the privilege. The number I’ll pull out of my rear is a million per year, but bring out the saltshaker on that figure.
Russia has no similar excuse here, considering that transport is about as complicated as driving from Nebraska to Iowa.
Sebastian
@Spanky:
Ukrainians on foot, armed with Javelins, NLAWs, and soon Panzerfaust-3s, are taking care of that.
Bayraktar drones are everywhere, not sure if armed, but that’s not even necessary with so much AT on the ground.
Yarrow
For news sources, Gin & Tonic recommended The Kyiv Independent. You can donate to them via a GoFundMe and several other methods.
West of the Rockies
@Sebastian:
I hope Russian military expenditures continue along those lines until Red Army is a husk under Putin.
Jay
@Spanky:
Orxy is like Bellingcat. They use social media, CCVTV, geolocation and a couple thousand volunteers to verify registration numbers, license plates, make, model, etc.
They also use their decade of experience to note the differences between destroyed, damaged and captured.
They only count confirmed equipment losses, not casualties or small arms.
they are acknowledged for their accuracy in Libya and the Armenian- Azerbaijani Conflict, along with tracking ISIL losses and modifications/deployments.
wvng
Speaking of subject area expertise, here’s Cheryl Rofer on Chernobyl. Chernobyl Update | Nuclear Diner (wordpress.com)
LadySuzy
@Sebastian: Both good and bad news. The fact that civilians are doing their best to help is a good thing. But the Ukrainian Army demanding help from civilians is a sad sign that their capabilities are not great. Do they still have some air power ?
Butch
Finding – surprise -that cable is too focused on drama. There are a couple of daily summaries at Kos that seem to be well informed and useful.
Miss Bianca
@Calouste:
Ouch! As a journalist I resemble that remark!
RaflW
@West of the Rockies: Plump notoriously doesn’t read. And since I’m very confident that the Biden team doesn’t produce a pictogram briefing for him, he probably doesn’t give anything they send (which is hopefully very carefully edited, and probably doesn’t match what Obama, Bush, etc might be receiving if they still do) a second’s notice.
OTOH, he probably has a lackey who is looking at ’em and sharing with others for a fee
eta @Scout211: Ah, good. At least that line of remunerative treason is closed.
Speaking of which, news last night that the boxes of docs found at and returned from Mar-a-Blowgo contain such sensitivity that many items will not be publicly catalogued for quite some time.
Yarrow
Don’t think this is going to make the oligarchs happy.
Link to FT story in the tweet.
Kelly
Germany sending 1,000 anti tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles to Ukraine
https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1497638989821407235
West of the Rockies
I hope we are approaching Putin’s Downfall moment (a la Bruno Ganz).
Yarrow
Heh.
Miss Bianca
@Yarrow: OK, that makes me laugh, too!
trollhattan
Doctrinaire Republican (i.e., massive douche) Tom McClintock coming around on the Russia thing.
Origuy
In an earlier thread, someone asked if Russia is sending a team to the Paralympics. As in the regular Olympics, Russians are not allowed to use their country’s flag and represent the Olympic Committee, not the country. The Russian Paralympic Committee is sending 71 athletes. The Ukrainian athletes may have a difficult time getting to Beijing. I’m sure that’s not the thing at the top of their minds right now.
The Russia ban is because of state-sponsored doping and applies, as far as I can tell, until the end of 2022. The flag of the Russian Olympic Committee is used and a piece of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 is used instead of the Russian anthem.
Another Scott
An excellent caution, and it’s always good to do estimates like a Fermi problem if possible.
However, Riho Terras has the background to have some idea of what he’s posting about:
(Emphasis added.)
Holding a position like that doesn’t mean he can’t make boneheaded posts – everyone can, but he’s not some Twitter rando.
TFG burned about $93 M throwing 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria for a few hours in 2017. Sebastian’s estimate above also indicates that war can be extremely expensive quickly.
Here, I mostly blame Twitter (as usual) for being horrible for nuance.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@Kelly: Wow, now they really are just like Trump.
AWOL
Sportswriter Slava Malamud on what a murderous piece of shit the NHL’s main Putin fluffer, Ovechkin, is, and what shits the Capitals’ PR department is.
Of note, the Penguin’s Malkin is also a big Putin supporter:
Malamud: Ovechkin has blood on his hands – TSN.ca
Sebastian
@LadySuzy:
No, this is not a bad sign. It is a classic Eastern European defense doctrine of territorial defense. The armed forces go after hard targets, the population makes movement difficult, and attacks supply lines and low-quality troops and garrisons.
If you want to see how this played out in the past, the Battle for Zadar in the Croatian war is a good example, a more modern and recent one is the documentation “Winter on Fire” on Netflix about the Ukrainian revolution.
Jay
@LadySuzy:
the Ukrainian AirForce is still flying, drones are up, loitering munitions are up.
in everything but morale and training, the UAF are out matched and out numbered.
Their former PM has formed a volunteer militia of 300 and is fighting on the front lines in Kiev.
it has been accepted by the Ukrainians that this is now a “Peoples War” for survival as a people and a nation.
Another Scott
From the original Riho Terras thread, it looks like the original 20B/day was 20B Rubles per day, at least according to this:
At 90 Rubles/dollar, that would be about $225M/day.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kelly
The videos of Russian military vehicles randomly scattered along roads out of fuel are astonishing. Individual vehicles and their crews alone or a few others barely within sight. I have absolutely no military training but wouldn’t your team all stop and fort up when deep in enemy territory at moments like this?
O. Felix Culpa
@Jay: What are loitering munitions? I assume they’re not hanging around illegally on street corners.
Spanky
@Kelly: An empty shell of a military, with nukes.
One has to wonder at the condition of their nuclear forces, both land and sea.
Ruckus
@Scout211:
He’d have to move up several notches to get to putz. A bunch of several notches. And putz is a lot of notches below normal human.
debbie
Spanky
@O. Felix Culpa: A drone or manned aircraft, in some kind of orbit over a battlespace, looking for targets of opportunity. E.g., a Predator armed with Hellfires.
Ken
@Yarrow: I’m mildly surprised the bonds weren’t already at junk status. But if you can’t trust the financial minds that signed off on real-estate mortgage bundle tranche credit default swaps….
debbie
Putin must not have sent his finest. //
O. Felix Culpa
@Spanky: Thank you for the explanation!
Mike E
@wvng: My simplistic take: It seems to me this is dirty spiteful terrorism resulting from Ukraine doing a stellar job thwarting Putin’s usual thuggery of poisoning/assassination…imo their defiance is personal to Putin and this is all a ridiculous temper tantrum, not some 11-dimension chess ploy for world domination. Incredibly reckless and capricious.
eta Phila Union has Ukraine’s flag colors festooned all along their goal-side fan section
Kent
You would think that if there was one thing the Russian army would have plenty of it is fuel. Aren’t they the one of the largest oil producing nations on the planet?
I guess it goes to logistics and keeping an armored column supplied in fuel is a pretty big logistical task. Especially across enemy territory that isn’t completely secured. I expect there is no easier target than a convoy of fuel trucks.
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
I wonder if his “briefings” are just BS sessions? Or if they give him every detail in Federally correct lingo, knowing that terminal overload is extremely possible, and very highly likely. And that all details will be forgotten or misremembered immediately.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@Scout211: Un-named sources have stated that privately Ivanka and Jared indicated they oppose Putin’s invasion.
Ken
@debbie: For those of us whose knowledge of the subject begins and ends with Hercule Poirot saying “But in the Russian alphabet, their letter ‘N’ is written like our letter ‘H’,” is a translation available?
EDIT: Never mind, google translate seems to have done a passable job. At least, there’s none of the usual warning flags, like mention of hovercrafts full of eels.
Jay
@O. Felix Culpa:
also known as “suicide drones” , small explosive drones that can loiter over an area until directed to a target, often used in conjunction with an armed larger drone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering_munition
Baud
Ukraine’s celebrities-turned-politicians do seem a class above America’s celebrities-turned-politicians.
Baud
@Ken:
Courtesy of google.
O. Felix Culpa
@Jay: Thanks. :)
This FTFNYT video bring tears. Putin may have bitten off more than he can chew. The Ukrainians are resolute…and increasingly armed
ETA: From the FT, an article on how ordinary Ukrainians prepared for a Russian invasion.
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan: Too little, too late, mofo.
Honestly, we Democrats need to go all out and hang the GOP’s Putin-philia around their necks like rotting carcasses around a chicken-thieving dog’s. Make *them* defend themselves against a charge of anti-Americanism for a change.
RaflW
@trollhattan: Lord have mercy, the lone Dem I can find for CA-05 looks like a perennial. I suppose it is one of the solid-R districts where it is no fun at all to run as D.
(Also, hahah: McClintock endorsed Ted Cruz for the Republican primary in 2016.)
VOR
I could certainly understand usage of weapons exceeding daily production. You have inventory of certain weapons and you use them up, inventory levels drop. This is more true for special items with normally limited production like armored vehicles, airplanes, certain types of munitions. But not that many orders of magnitude, no way.
This can be alleviated somewhat if special production efforts are made. The USSR built 35k T-34s and 29k T-34/85 tanks during WW2, more than the 49K for all variants of the comparable US M-4 Sherman. The cost per unit kept dropping as improvements made their way into the production process. I’m sure daily T-34 production was exceeding daily losses by the end of the war. But that’s a wartime footing and I doubt current Russian tank factories are on similar schedules.
Trump always used to claim the US was out of ammunition when he took over. Probably someone told him we were low on inventory of some unusual type of bomb or shell and he mis-interpreted what he heard. Surprise, surprise.
debbie
debbie
@Ken:
I had hoped embedding the tweet would look like what I saw, having clicked on the translate thingie. Sorry.
Ken
@O. Felix Culpa: We’ll know the tide has really turned when Ukraine starts talking about the disputed status of Volgograd Oblast.
Steeplejack
@Ken:
Translation:
Kent
Read an interesting twitter thread about how most modern armies are incapable of the kind of urban siege warfare that this war is starting to turn into. Simply because they are too small. During WW2, sieges of single cities took hundreds of thousands of troops in battles like Stalingrad, Moscow, etc. The US sent something like 100,000 marines to siege the tiny island of Iwo Jima. As big as the Russian invasion force is, it is nowhere near the number required to lay siege on a large modern city and conquer it block by block. Which mostly requires getting out on foot and going block to block in hand to hand combat. The US siege of Falluja might be instructive. It took something like 15,000 US and UK forces nearly two months to conquer Falluja, a city that is about 1/10th the size of Kiev. And the US had far greater air supremacy and technological superiority than Russia has over Ukraine.
RaflW
@Kent: Ukraine forces were blowing up bridge sections (the pic I saw looked smart: a vital portion gone, but right by the riverbank, not one of the high span parts that would take a ton of time and $$ later to replace.).
If they’ve done this in multiple places, the fuel convoys have to find circuitous alternate routes. Where, if other reports are credible, obstacles, snipers, improvised incendiaries, etc are waiting to hit these lightly armed supply groups.
debbie
@Steeplejack:
Take a look at the photo embedded in the tweet I posted. See what Russian soldiers look like in this Great Age of Putin.
Cameron
@Baud: We don’t do too well with politicians-turned-celebrities, either. Look at all those wankers who appear on Dancing With The Stars.
Sebastian
@Another Scott:
That is a much more realistic number. If you exclude losses.
debbie
Sunflower Grammy has competition:
Jay
@VOR:
most of the Cold War tank production in the USSR, was in Ukraine. Ditto for aircraft, rockets and missiles.
word is that the Russians destroyed the Antares plant in Kharkiv, so no more resupply flights to the ISS. They built the first stage of the rockets.
a huge chunk of the Russian Military relies on equipment originally built in Ukraine.
Another Scott
@Kent: I can’t find it now, but I have distinct recollection of one of the pictures out of Fallujah showing a street with what looked like a macramé project running between the structures – thousands of strings or tripwires running everywhere. For blocks.
Armed defenders in a large urban environment have a huge advantage.
Cheers,
Scott.
Gin & Tonic
@RaflW: I know what a lot of Ukrainian roads are like. They are not autobahns. I’d hate to be driving a fuel truck on one right now. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can be doing 30 kph.
Scout211
@RaflW:
Ugh! McClintock *spit* is my “representative,” currently in CA-04 and then next year, in the newly-formed CA-05. I’ve never heard of the lone Dem running, Mike Barkley. This does not bode well.
We have a “top two” primary in June. It looks like we will most likely have two Republicans on the November ballot.
McClintock *spit!* is like a ventriloquist’s dummy. His mouth moves but the words are never his. It is interesting that the R leadership is telling him to change his statements on Russia right now. They control his words 100%. So the leadership is apparently moving away from Trump’s version of Russia and Putin.
Eolirin
@Scout211: If Trump refuses to also do so, that could be good for us.
Sebastian
@Kent:
zhena gogolia
If it’s rubles, why is there a dollar sign?
NotMax
Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit.
zhena gogolia
@debbie: Ha, that really does say “bitches,” but it’s usually translated as “sons of bitches.”
Ruckus
I think we have to remember that vlad is a very wealth man, and it isn’t from his salary of the last 22 yrs. He lives in a country where his cronies are also very wealthy, and the majority of his citizens are not even close. In a society like his, that comes from, shall we say, questionable processes. One of those is to fuck with the books, spend billions of rubles on say fuel trucks but actually only purchase a few at exorbitant markups. And/or buy hundreds of millions of rounds of rifle ammunition and actually only take possession of a few thousand at best. The normal human description of this is robing peter to pay vlad. This, as I understand it, is quite normal in Russia. There is cheating going on!
My point is that there is grift in most types of military purchasing. It is practiced in different ways in different countries, here it is relatively closed bidding and many levels of production from the actual work up to the actual delivery. Hands out as it were. Another way, say in Russia, might be that a thousand trucks are ordered but 400 are delivered for the same money. Or a million
gallonsliters of fuel are ordered and paid for but only 250Kgallonliters are delivered. Juggling the books, or keeping two sets. So if 40K soldiers are sent to Ukraine with full fuel tanks but no additional fuel or extra bullets, because they don’t exist, or if the training is lacking because it costs money that has been redirected to offshore bank accounts….Another Scott
@zhena gogolia: He made a mistake.
My guess, anyway.
[eta:] I’m reminded of a very old story about monstrous real estate prices in Hong Kong in “dollars” when Hong Kong dollars were worth about 13 US cents and the writer didn’t make the conversion properly.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Thin Black Duke
Maybe hanging around Trump made Putin stupider?
Ken
@The Thin Black Duke: Hmmm…. Could we turn “Everything Trump touches dies” into a force for good?
(Probably not — the idea has that “Monkey’s Paw” feel to it.)
Jay
https://mockpaperscissors.com/2022/02/26/stop-thief-2/
Sebastian
Geminid
@VOR: The SovietUnion very single mindedly built up it’s industrial base in the decade before WWII, and it was pretty large by 1941. Russia’ base is kind of the opposite now, I think. And in terms of the people that use the weapons and eqipment, there may have been a comparable decline, if only in motivation.
Kent
Russia also reportedly has enormous levels of small-scale corruption of the sort that doesn’t really exist in NATO.
Platoon commanders siphoning off gasoline and selling it for cash. Supply clerks selling off food, ammo, etc. Having lived in Latin America I can report that such corruption, once it takes root, is exceedingly difficult to root out. Those who aren’t cashing in increasingly look like suckers.
Gotta wonder how the paper inventories of fuel, food, etc. for various Russian units are reconciled against the reality.
germy
Sebastian
Stingers, Javelins, NLAWs, Bayraktars.
The Russian army is being burned alive.
Sebastian
Lost and out of gas.
bbleh
@West of the Rockies: @Yarrow: IIRC, he is not. It’s done as a courtesy only and/or if the current administration thinks a former president can be useful in, eg, a semi-official diplomatic role. I’m pretty sure I recall Biden saying that wasn’t the case here, and he was terminating any briefings.
@Scout211: and there we are.
Mallard Filmore
@The Dangerman:
I remember that. If the reports are accurate, there were many vehicles full of Kuwaiti loot racing back to Iraq. I don’t have much sympathy for them.
I do not currently wish that fate on the young draftees that were suckered into this invasion. If the boredom of occupation turns their behavior foul, I will update my view.
RaflW
One nagging concern is if this shock campaign is coming off as badly as might be, coupled with much stronger resistance than expected, will Putin react with greater and greater war crimes?
Would he consider chemical weapon attacks? I saw mention of thermobaric weapons (new UK Independent article) which I had to look up yesterday, and oh, ugh.
Another Scott
Recall that many take Chernobyl as the beginning of the end of the USSR because people could see that their government had been lying to them…
(via dick_nixon)
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@germy: Penn was with VladDavidzon in Kyiv for a day or more before the invasion (photos on V’s Twitter stream).
Cheers,
Scott.
The Pale Scot
Paging Adam,
Looks like the Chechens have arrived, I hope not…
https://twitter.com/DawidK_7/status/1497596179613466629
Sebastian
@Kent:
This.
I commented something along those lines last night. Kyiv has pop 3,000,000.
One million people participating in armed resistance in one way or another. The only way Russia can take this is with WW2 level of conscription.
bbleh
@O. Felix Culpa: That wouldn’t be illegal anyway — Second Amendment you know.
Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@Mike E: How long before he starts executing his generals for failing?
Starboard Tack
@Gin & Tonic: Makes for large, slow, explosive targets.
germy
eclare
@The Pale Scot: I just read that one of their generals has been killed, Tushayev. On my phone, so no link.
Ruckus
@Kent:
They lie.
They know they lie so they lie about the lying. They are also the people that check for people lying and stealing. So it works out well for them.
Sebastian
@The Pale Scot:
They lasted less than a day. Their general killed, the unit annihilated per confirmed reports.
Spanky
@The Pale Scot: Did they bring their own ammo and fuel?
ETA Made moot by Sebastian above.
Mallard Filmore
@O. Felix Culpa:
Bloody lollygagers.
Ken
@Ruckus: It’s not a lie, every record says it’s true. — Ministry of Truth
It’s not a lie, and we will hurt you badly until you agree. — Ministry of Love
Sebastian
I think what hasn’t sunk in yet is that this disaster for the Russian army will be an earthquake in the entire region.
Kazakstan and Belarus were only able to suppress their population with Russian help. They are the next to fall.
Jay
@The Pale Scot:
keep in mind that Igor Ghirkin (sp) is Igor Streklov, the former FSB commander of the Separatist Forces, who decided to “retire” to Russia when the ATO had all but defeated the Separatists, and the RUAF had to commit regular army troops to save their asses.
While he is a critic of Russia, in Russia, it’s mostly from the other side, that they arn’t going hard enough.
Spanky
@Sebastian: A general commanding a regiment? Talk about rank inflation. That’s usually a Light Colonel’s job.
Lyrebird
@Sebastian: Don’t know if you’ll see this, but:
Thanks so much for what you shared yesterday based on your own experience.
May the bloodshed cease soon, and the tyrant retreat and or get retired.
(edited for clarity)
Brit in Chicago
@Jay: Where can I find this Orxy? Googling the word didn’t help..
Calouste
@Sebastian: Conscripting 2 million soldiers does jack shit for Putin if he doesn’t have 100,000 officers to go with them. Offensive wars require a lot more organization and coordination than defensive wars.
The Pale Scot
@The Pale Scot:
On the other hand
Gin & Tonic
@eclare: Here’s the link:
The Pale Scot
@Sebastian:
Great news
Cameron
I don’t go to Turcopolier very often, but I was curious about Pat Lang’s thoughts on the Russian invasion. He notes a number of specific actions that we could take (and maybe we are already) to help the Ukrainians. Although at this point, it doesn’t sound like they need it.
Sebastian
@Spanky:
Par for the course. They are all just two-bit mobsters. Like Arkan’s Tigrovi, the “Elite” unit of the Krajina Serbs. The only thing special about them were the custom made uniforms.
IIRC it wasn’t even Croatian Army who slaughtered them but Ministry of the Interior units, i.e. cops.
zhena gogolia
@The Pale Scot: Really?
Gin & Tonic
@The Pale Scot: Looks like at least one of them will be staying.
Jinchi
@RaflW: Tfg reads. But only if his name is featured prominently in the Title.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: Wow.
ETA: I was all shaking in my boots about the Chechens. Hmm.
Ken
@zhena gogolia: I’m getting a kind of “Wait a minute, the Ukrainians shoot back?” feeling from these reports. Especially that quote from The Pale Scot, assuming it’s correctly translated.
zhena gogolia
@Ken: It’s so weird. Like doesn’t Putin have any intelligence services?
Jay
@Brit in Chicago:
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/?m=1
https://mobile.twitter.com/oryxspioenkop?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
eclare
@Ken: Looks like the “fuck your warship” attitude has taken hold nationwide.
Kalakal
@Sebastian: So they really were the successors to scum like the Dirlewanger & Kaminski brigades.
marcopolo
@Brit in Chicago: I’ve seen their posts in one of these two twitter Ukraine war compilation lists (don’t remember which–one is via Daniel Dale, the other from Josh Marshall):
https://mobile.twitter.com/i/lists/1494877848087187461 (Marshall list)
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1494327296383021062 (Dale list
There is overlap between these two but probably around 90–100ish different twitter users posts (by folks these two consider reliable sources of info: news agencies, individual reporters, military experts, gov’t offices like the UA ministry of defense, etc…) between the two of them.
zhena gogolia
@Brit in Chicago: Looks as if it’s Oryx, not Orxy.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Walking home from dinner with family, it struck me that it’s likely that Putin has not read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, and I don’t know whether to be worried or grateful for it.
In that book, the Soviet Union faces a massive petroleum shortfall due to a terrorist attack on a major extraction facility, and they decide that their only solution is to seize the Persian Gulf states for their oil, but to do that, they first have to neutralize NATO as a military threat.
They do the political posturing, though over a stretch of months, not days … and they get serious about military readiness, by shooting four regimental colonels for falsifying readiness reports, as an example to others. That turns out to be the first clue for Western military intelligence that something’s hinky.
In the book, the Soviets lose the element of surprise, misjudge NATO’s fighting resolve, get bogged down fighting what was supposed to be a mobile campaign, and the government ultimately collapses.
Now if Putin had read the book, he might have learned lessons from the fiction, so maybe we should be grateful he seems to have made some of the same mistakes as the fictional Soviets did. Or maybe if he’d read the book, he might have had second thoughts about invading in the first place.
I don’t know…
MagdaInBlack
@zhena gogolia: Yeah wow.
Someone I listened to yesterday said the Chechens were being sent in as “bullet catchers” and they wouldn’t be too happy when they found that out.
The Thin Black Duke
@zhena gogolia: Intel is worthless if you don’t listen to it.
debbie
Whatever is said may be lost in translation, but the word “jackal” popped up, so…
Jay
@zhena gogolia:
Katerov’s (sp) forces rely on brutality, corruption and local divisions to keep order. They arn’t the Chechens that defended Grozny, they are the Russian Camp Followers that like vultures, picked up the remains.
Ken
@The Thin Black Duke: It’s also worthless if you shoot people who don’t tell you what you want to hear.
Baud
Google Translate is loving this war.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: LOL. Mine is sure getting a work out.
The Pale Scot
And NCOs, Russia doesn’t have career sergeants, they are selected from 2 yr conscripts that show some aptitude
Geminid
@zhena gogolia: Putin seems to have cowed his intelligence agencies into subserviance. The was some footage from a public “consultation” he held with national security chiefs, early in the past week. The head of the FSR intelligence agency was nervous and flustered as Putin toyed with him. It was strange.
Mike E
Nedo Elite squad of jackals not having time to accept, where he got on the teeth, a dog without a head – not a necessary dog
@debbie: heh well, google translate isn’t very good on nuance
zhena gogolia
@debbie:
Okay, I don’t know Ukrainian, but let me try. Google translate gives me:
Which makes no sense. I’m thinking it’s something like “The substandard detachment of jackals hardly got here before it got it in the teeth. A dog without a head is a worthless dog.” All I know is that google translate sucks donkey balls.
Miss Bianca
@Sebastian: Whoa. For reals?
zhena gogolia
@Geminid: I haven’t been able to make myself watch it, although a Russian friend said I really should, it’s quite something. Naryshkin.
Miss Bianca
@The Pale Scot: Wow, that was a fast turnaround.
Mallard Filmore
@Geminid:
It was so different from images of Trump meetings with his cabinet. Putin must love having competent people around him that he can browbeat, ignore, and force to agree with him.
Trump needs to have fawning lap-dogs that smile at him.
The Pale Scot
@zhena gogolia:
It’s all over the Goooogle
Could you translate this cartoon? It looks hysterical, translators can’t hel
https://fill.com.ua/gif/dobryv
or
https://twitter.com/fill_feaouill/status/1497591735815483403
Jay
@Geminid:
according to one of the few remaining Independent Media orgs in Russia, it was the same day that Putin recorded his declaration of war. They noticed that Pootie Poot was wearing the same tie, then scrubbed the meta data, so 4 days before his “declaration of war”, he had already recorded his declaration of war.
The Dangerman
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Same applies to 9/11. Someone said “who would have think it” and maybe they should have read the book (forget which one) and prepared better.
Clancy went coo coo for Cocoa Puffs in later years but some of his early works were great.
Sebastian
@The Pale Scot:
His wish was granted. He has no troops left to fight the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians killed them.
Uncle Cosmo
I see he provided a link, and if you look closely, you’ll see you should’ve tried “Oryx” – because the Canucklehead never has been able to spell worth a damn.
Miss Bianca
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: God damn it, you’ve just convinced me I ought to read some Tom Clancy. Harumph!
The Pale Scot
@Ken:
“Wait a minute, the Ukrainians shoot back?”
Me Too
Sebastian
@Lyrebird:
You are welcome!
SiubhanDuinne
@Ken:
Funny, I just happened to read that story three or four days ago. (Research. For the course I’m preparing. Yeah, that’s it.)
Jay
@The Dangerman:
like Patrick Lang,
Uncle Cosmo
@The Pale Scot: FTR, it has for many years been a foundational principle that when sending in troops against one part of the Former USSR, units should be ethnically as different as possible from the target population. E.g., IIRC, most of the formations shipped to Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring were from east of the Urals and heavily Asiatic in composition. Same in 1991 when troops were sent to Lithuania to quell nationalist “unrest” there.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I was told there would be no math on this blog
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
Agreed.
trollhattan
@The Dangerman: Condi and “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” was all the novel they required. What did Bushie say in response, “You’ve covered your ass”?
No consequences whatever, and Condi gets zen massages over at the Hoover Institute spa.
Jay
@Uncle Cosmo:
yup, but my google fu is good, and I’m not a pedant or an asshole.
jeffreyw
zhena gogolia
@zhena gogolia: I watched it. That fucking fuck. I dream of seeing that smirk wiped off his fucking face.
Sebastian
@Miss Bianca:
For reals.
Putin put his dick in a wood chipper.
The Pale Scot
@Mike E:
I got
The underdeveloped jackal detachment did not have time to come, where it got on its teeth, a dog without a head is not a necessary dog
zhena gogolia
@The Pale Scot: Again, I don’t know Ukrainian, just Russian. I’m guessing he’s telling them to dig their own graves. The little guy says, “How can you, these are living people.” He says, “They’re not people, they’re fertilizer.” There’s more to it but all I can get is the Russian says they’re here to liberate them, and the Ukrainian guy says something I can’t decipher.
I have to get back to work!
eclare
@Geminid: The “speak plainly, Sergei” video. He looked terrified and couldn’t give a yes or no answer to Vlad. I hope he lives on the ground floor, avoids tea, avoids bathtubs, etc.
Ken
@SiubhanDuinne: Christie used it a couple of times, including with a monogram “B. P.” which IIRC was on a pair of gloves left near, or maybe even inside, a robbed safe. As Poirot also said in that other story, “Has it occurred to you that there are too many clues in this compartment?”
(Though that might have been from the Albert Finney movie, not from the novel.)
SiubhanDuinne
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot:
“We’re totally opposed to this unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, but don’t worry, we’ll never say it out loud.” Same as they always were. They make me fucking sick.
zhena gogolia
@The Pale Scot: See my #177. I have a feeling I’m closer.
Another Scott
@jeffreyw: Thanks for the link.
Wait for it…
Cheers,
Scott.
SiubhanDuinne
@Ken: It’s directly from the short story.
Captain C
@zhena gogolia: I suspect that they are finding out the hard way that committing brutality on an unarmed or lightly armed population is not the same as fighting 40 million people with an organized army and lots of weapons among the populace (ETA: and very high motivation). Their bad reputation will ensure that they are given no quarter, either. If it’s true that their most elite unit was mauled and its commander killed (I assume the dude was one of Kadyrov’s top henchmen), this could also have follow-on effects down the road in Chechnya over time.
Brit in Chicago
@Jay: Thanks!
The Pale Scot
@Miss Bianca:
Red Storm Rising is amazingly relevant, but I would use an eReader and search for the Russian General who is a primary character
Captain C
@Ken: If that quote’s accurate, I’m now wondering if Putin lied to Kadyrov, like he lied to his own soldiers, that it was just going to be a peacekeeping cakewalk. Praetorian groups selected for loyalty (and in Kadyrov’s case, enjoyment of brutality) seldom turn out to be effective fighting forces against motivated, trained forces.
Another Scott
@SiubhanDuinne: Spinoza forgot the Maggie Haversham by-line.
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Brit in Chicago
@marcopolo: Thanks!
Miss Bianca
@SiubhanDuinne: Wait a minute…that sounds like a NYT Pitchbot/DougJ tweet to me. Pretty sure I saw one that read just like that the other day.
Unless reality is now chasing satire, and catching up. In which case, go DougJ!
Uncle Cosmo
@Jay: But you still can’t spell worth a damn, fuckhead.
Captain C
@zhena gogolia:
A kleptocrat whose enemies have a habit of dying in unnatural ways will always, over time, find himself surrounded with people who will only tell him what they think he wants to hear at any given moment. After 22+ years, I think this is where Putin is, in spades.
Mike E
@The Pale Scot: yours works better on the Wukraine Clan joint! ?
The Pale Scot
@Uncle Cosmo:
Yea, the POWs taken for the most part don’t look like ethnic Russians. The Belarusians complaining about units BIVOUACed outside their villages included that in their complaints. ” They’re not from around these here parts”
eclare
Chelski turned over to the club’s foundation, according to The Guardian.
Miss Bianca
@The Pale Scot: Heh. Just ordered the dead tree version from the library. But I will keep your recommendation in mind.
The Pale Scot
@zhena gogolia:
Thanks!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“I am burning with shame”
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia:
You got it. You know more Ukrainian than you let on.
trollhattan
@jeffreyw: “Let loose the
dogskittys of war.”The Ukraine girls really knock me out.
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia:
Russian says “we came to liberate you”, Ukrainian responds “by Grads [truck-mounted rocket launchers] into kindergartens?”
Miss Bianca
In unrelated news, I just fired off a No Fucks Left to Give email response to one of our actors who has outed himself as an antivaxxer and who wanted to give me a long song-and-dance about why our house policies for actors (you should be vaxxed, mask up inside the theater, social distance as much as possible) shouldn’t have to apply to him. Told him to keep his shit to himself, I wouldn’t have cast him but the other directors did, fine, he won’t get vaxxed, whatever, but mask up in the theater.
And then I signed off with, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going back to monitoring the start of World War III and praying for people who have some REAL fucking problems to deal with.”
Too much? : )
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: Haha. I used to be able to read it, at any rate. And you pick up some from Hohol, of course.
Uncle Cosmo
IMO, if we’re going to cite future-war novels as templates, the one to be concerned with is The Third World War of 1978 (rev. 1982), wherein the USSR & Warsaw Pact attack NATO, are halted and then pushed back. To “show resolve” (and hoping to scare the West into backing down) the Soviets lob a missile with a megaton-size warhead at Birmingham (UK).**
That is the book I hope no one around Vlad the Paler remembers.
** US/UK respond by nuking Minsk, and the Soviet government collapses.
Mike E
@Miss Bianca: Is there no understudy available?
RaflW
@Sebastian: Belarus forces were part of the first invasion wave according to some reports (Atlantic Council among them). Seems the Belarus president denied this, so I’m unclear.
eclare
@Miss Bianca: Bravo!
Kalakal
@Miss Bianca: Not at all, good for you. They’re a whiny cry baby with no sense of proportion. I’m so very tired of hearing “Help! Help! I’m being repressed!” from people who, at worst, are being mildly inconvenienced.
Gin & Tonic
As a bit of a diversion, something about the building you see in the Zelensky videos
My son lived around the corner.
Kalakal
@Uncle Cosmo: That book scared the hell out of me. Hackett didn’t pull any punches
Miss Bianca
@Mike E: Alas, no. But I cc’d both directors for the shows he was cast in on my response. Once of them has already told me he’s fine with it.
ETA: Actually, we could probably do some cast-shuffling if he decides to flounce off in a huff. Just wouldn’t be optimal. I don’t mind what he thinks as long as he doesn’t tell me about it. And abides by the rules.
James E Powell
Noted: On MSNBC, the chyron referred to Chornobyl, using romanized Ukrainian spelling.
The Dangerman
@Miss Bianca: Clancy is best read in a certain order. His characters repeat. A lot of them.
Adam Silverman would be a great John Clark (I might be screwing up the characters name; it’s been a while). Hunt for Red October or Patriot Games should be first.
There is one in the series where John Clark becomes John Clark; good book but you can jump over it.
Kent
@jeffreyw: It’s an old pic but still beautiful. A google image search brings up 2018 tweets with that pic.
Miss Bianca
@The Dangerman: Ah, I get you. Thanks for the tips!
Another Scott
True? No idea. The fog of war is real.
(via CherylRofer)
Cheers,
Scott.
StringOnAStick
@Miss Bianca: It was, that’s Dougj, not a true bit about Jared and Ivanka.
trollhattan
Roadsign wars, Ukraine bringing their A-game.
https://twitter.com/MinkinaNataly/status/1497637814841839622
Kent
Plus weapons, vehicles, logistics, training, bases, etc. If all you are going to do is hand them a pair of surplus fatigues, boots, and a rifle that is one thing. That’s defense of Moscow and Stalingrad stuff. But if you want to build an effective fighting division that can be projected forward in an offensive war that’s another thing entirely.
Geminid
@SiubhanDuinne: Kushner may have too much Russian money in loans to rock the boat. Semi-retired journalist Xeni Jardin has been tweeting about various people and companies who’ve gotten investments and loans from Yuri Milner, at @Xeni. Milner is said to be a billionaire investor, but Jardin and others say his money comes from the Russian state. Jardin is putting up a lot of material now about Russian penetration of Silicon Valley. Some of it is retweets of old threads, as she has been following the story for a while, particularly because of a Jeffrey Epstein connection.
Jardin has a personal conection to the story. Sometime around the beginning of the last decade she attended several dinners sponsored by the Edge Foundation. These were designed for networking among tech inustry titans, and according to Jardin they were put on by Yuri Milner and Jeffrey Epstein. Jardin was a tech culture journalist at the time, and a very ornamental one.
Another Scott
(via oryxspioenkop)
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@Kent: Logistics is hard. *Really* hard. I imagine its even harder when the people tasked with carrying out maybe aren’t fully on board with the plan.
It seems to me a lot of Russians must have relatives/acquaintances in Ukraine. And anyone with a memory of a unified Soviet Union would now be in their 50s. Anyone driving a fuel truck across a military front doesn’t have the same nostalgia that Putin does. I suspect there’s less of a cultural border there than there is a political one. And that’s always difficult to motivate people to fight.
I used to have to remind the faculty all the time that they can decide to do whatever the fuck they want, but if the staff isn’t on board, it ain’t getting done. There’s a lot of worker bees between Putin and an occupied Ukraine, and they can choose to work hard, to work slow, to not work, and even to undermine the plan using the authority they’ve been given. Putin can put the most rabid soldiers on the tip of his spear, but some middle manager 1000 miles away can completely negate their effectiveness by losing some paperwork regarding a shipment of ammunition. And there’s always about 10x as many logistics staff as there are soldiers. You don’t even need that many of them to say ‘fuck this shit’ before you grind to a halt.
trollhattan
@Miss Bianca: Too much? Nyet! I’m having an imaginary cigarette in your honor. :-)
Gin & Tonic
@James E Powell: Wow, that’s something.
Tdjr
@Miss Bianca: Good for you!?
Gin & Tonic
@trollhattan: Sadly, not a real sign, more like a suggestion (and a ‘shop job) by the federal highway department.
eclare
@Gin & Tonic: Last night Jimmy Kimmel stressed that it is Ukraine, not *the* Ukraine.
Miss Bianca
@Another Scott: Holy shit!
Lyrebird
@Another Scott: THanks for that.
Looks like for those sending prayers, time to ramp ’em up:
Air raid sirens, major bombardment of Kyiv https://kyivindependent.com/national/russias-war-on-ukraine-where-fighting-is-on-now-feb-26-live-updates/
Peale
@Captain C: he probably told him his job would be killing old farmers and raping their daughters like the Chechyans get to do. Basically the fun terrorizing villagers war crimes kind of things.
frankly, I was hoping they’d last longer, since the more of his men killed, the better the world is.
Sebastian
@Another Scott:
I really hope they are alive. If they are, they will never have to pay for a drink again.
Kent
They don’t even need to say “fuck this shit”. Ordinary Russian corruption will do the job. That fuel shipment headed towards Ukraine? Half of it gets pumped off for cash along the way.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Doug R
@Spanky: Even a UAV could really fuck up fuel convoys.
Gin & Tonic
@Martin: Exactly, which is why I’ve pretty much scoffed at the “install a puppet government” thing. Ukraine is a big country, with a population over 40 million and an area of nearly a quarter-million square miles. It needs a big government, at various levels, federal, state (oblast), municipal. If 80% is vehemently opposed to you being there, how do you work around that?
Another Scott
@Another Scott: Speaking of knowing your sources…
(via CherylRofer)
Sorry for the noise. Those responsible have been sacked.
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
@Sebastian: I’ve been reading your comments for a couple of days and I sure hope you are right. “Kill em all” General McCaffery thinks they Russians are going to steamroll Ukraine in short order and all this stuff about them being “conscripts” and poorly led is wishful thinking.
Gin & Tonic
@Lyrebird: This is the reality, sadly. It is now just about midnight. All this Western moral support is good, and the Ukrainian armed forces are holding up admirably, but there will be many long nights and long days ahead. I do not see an exit strategy for Putin, and a cornered animal is a dangerous thing.
The Pale Scot
Shouldn’t suicide be “suicide”
Gin & Tonic
Supposedly paratroopers dropping into Kyiv now. I’m not a military guy, but isn’t this kind of stupid, unless they control the ground (NB: they don’t)
Another Scott
William Woods University should change their policies.
(via Popehat)
Cheers,
Scott.
Kalakal
@Gin & Tonic: It also seems strange to drop paratroopers into the middle of an air raid/bombardment which is also being reported
Nettoyeur
@trollhattan: Not exactly. Grannies have taken down all the signs, they are having trouble with breakdowns and fuel, and every able bodied Ukrainian wants to blow them up.
Baud
@The Pale Scot:
Technically, “suicide” requires being thrown out of a window.
Kalakal
@The Pale Scot: How many times did he shoot himself in the back of the head?
The Pale Scot
@Gin & Tonic:
Unless there’s an airport there, it must be something else. Especially with all those rifles being handed out.
Duck Season….Russkie Season
Duck Season….Russkie Season
Duck Season….Russkie Season
Duck Season….Russkie Season
Russkie Season.. FIRE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-k5J4RxQdE
Yarrow
@eclare: For those that didn’t know what this meant, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich is turning over “stewardship” of the Premier League football club Chelsea, which he’s owned for almost 20 years. He’s not being forced out of ownership but it’s a step in the right direction.
Another Scott
@Gin & Tonic: A reply in that thread:
[eta:] I assume that real paratroopers going into a city would at least have those parachutes that they can steer rather than the big fluffy ice cream cone ones.
Cheers,
Scott.
dr. luba
BREAKING: European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, UK, Canada, U.S. announce they will disconnect certain Russian banks from Swift and will take restrictive measures to prevent the Russian Central Bank from deploying its international reserves to undermine sanctions.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic:
Weird. First, the planes bringing them would be easy to shoot down relative to fighters, etc. and second, how easy is it to land inside a bloody city? Stop sign up the crotch, powerlines, etc. Then there are those Ukrainians and their AK47s to think about. Hard to shoot back while you’re in the air.
Guessing tactically that special forces are of value to get in before the ground troops, to destroy special targets, conduct assassinations and the like.
Miss Bianca
@dr. luba: WOO HOO!
I was just reading the Treasury report on the sanctions that the US had imposed a few days ago, so this is welcome additional news.
Also, according to reports I’ve seen on the Kyiv Independent Twitter feed, looks like the US is stepping on the gas to get money for humanitarian relief and arms to Ukraine.
Gin & Tonic
EU Council President von der Leyen is announcing the removal of Russian banks from SWIFT. Lufthansa has turned some planes around, reportedly, and it seems that EU airspace is closed to Russian airlines.
Another Scott
@dr. luba: Good, good. It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s important.
Thanks for the news.
Hang in there.
Cheers,
Scott.
Yarrow
@dr. luba: Great news!
RJM
Thanks don’t usually have very long range, maybe 150 miles, and idling will use up fuel too. They may well have been full when they crossed the border, but they really can’t operate without a good supply chain.
@Kent: seems to me that even if they have good levels of supply at depots they have maybe a few days before vast quantities of IEDs start showing up in the roads, so they’ll have to do effective route clearance or lose a lot of fuel tankers.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I got to wondering that too, the deferred maintenance and graft seems wide spreed.
Uncle Cosmo
The Hunt for Red October – Clancy’s debut novel, which happened to show up at the Naval Institute Press at the very moment when they were ready to jump into fiction, and which (I have read) required heavy editing before it could be published – I agree with.
But for doG’s sake, not Patriot Games – it is literally the worst of his books. My guess (and it’s just a guess) is that it was written long before HFRO, and gathered manifold rejection slips. My guess is that after Red Storm Rising, Clancy had signed a contract with a publisher to deliver X manuscripts in Y months, and found himself on the verge of defaulting – when he remembered the draft of PG mildewing in his attic, dragged it down and delivered it (after hasty or no revision) on time.
Seriously, Patriot Games is one instance where the movie, unremarkable as it is, is still far, far superior to the book, which is IMHO drivel.
(And FWIW, HFRO and Red Storm Rising were both heavily dependent, if not largely based on, war games developed by fellow author Larry Bond. As Casey Stengel said, You could look it up.)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Baud: Yes, they were pointing out the mayor of Kyev has the money to bail on a private plane and he is there fighting.
Gravenstone
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot: Well, that’ll leave him quaking in fear. Now won’t it?
RaflW
@Gin & Tonic: Aeroflot 109 just took off from LAX towards Sheremetyevo. I hope to fk that’s the last of those for a while.
There’s AFL103 scheduled out of JFK in just under two hours as well. I’m just damn irritated that the RU state-owned airline was let into US airspace this morning. Shut the damn door.
raven
@Another Scott: Not Ukraine but Russian paratroops and they regular chutes.
topclimber
@dr. luba: Read somewhere that Russia had built up $320 billion in foreign reserves as war chest. If this is inaccessible, great!
J R in WV
@The Dangerman:
From our cabin in SE AZ we see A-10s on training flights come across the Dragoon mtns and drop past our little hill, below our house until the reach the hills east of us. Thunderous in flight, we see them launch IR missile decoys but have never seen them fire weapons of any sort.
Have seen them firing in training video, and news imagery showing tanks and bunkers exploding under A-10 fire. Wish Ukraine had them on hand. Their improvised munitions appear to be working pretty well so far, tho. Professionally designed and built mines, Ukrainian Cocktails being created in basements all over the nation.
Best of luck to those brave people!!
ETA: Fuck the Russian Military ~!!~
trollhattan
@Uncle Cosmo:
I threw in the towel on Clancy and it was the book, forget the title, where the Big Crime was ecoterrorist hippies unleashing a virus (stop me if you’ve heard this anywhere else) around the globe to, you know, kill a bunch of worthless humans to Save the Planet.
It was 500 or more pages of hippie punching and by then, Clancy clearly had no editor and allowed his crappy, crappy dialogue to barf across multiple pages of speech as dialogue. Must have been an Ayn Rand fan.
October and Red Storm were can’t-put-it-down books; too bad that guy wasn’t around for the rest of Clancy’s career.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
ahhahah
I was wondering if it was just the other away around. Putin has always been a blow hard making the dumbest choice and Russian propaganda was always able to hide his failures, and that’s why Trump so desperately wants to be like Putin.
Another Scott
@raven: Ok, that’s probably fine for jumping into an open field, but would seem to be suicide for a city.
From your linky:
(As you know) War is dangerous business, even before getting to “the action”.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
@J R in WV: Ask the Iraqi’s caught on the “highway of death”.
Tim C.
Another Scott
@J R in WV: I remember hiking in the hills in Dolly Sods, WV in the early ’90s and hearing some rumbling noise all of a sudden. Then a couple of A-10s flew low over our head.
Quite a sight.
(They’re amazing planes and quite tough, but they’re old (first flight in 1972) and it’s not clear how sensible they are for today’s world of shoulder-launched missiles. Like everything, it probably depends on the circumstances. JMHO.)
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@J R in WV:
Guessing those AC-130 gunships, while they’re not sneaking up on anybody, make quite an impression on anybody unfortunate enough to be within their sight. J version armaments:
1× 30 mm ATK GAU-23/A autocannon[101]
1× 105 mm M102 howitzer (AC-130J Ghostrider only as of 2017)[102][103][104]
‘Gunslinger’ weapons system with launch tube for AGM-176 Griffin missiles and/or GBU-44/B Viper Strike munitions (10 round magazines)[8]
Wing mounted, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs (SDBs), and/or GBU-53/B SDB IIs[8] (4 per hardpoint on BRU-61/A rack)
Holy shit.
raven
@Another Scott: “Open fields” are no piece of cake. My old man was on a destroyer and watched the jump on Corregidor at 500 feet.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Sebastian: Sounds like the claims the Chechens were only good for killing unarmed civilians weren’t over exaggerated.
Kalakal
@trollhattan: I enjoyed October & Red Storm.
Thought Cardinal of the Kremlin was bad, Debt of Honor ( or whatever it’s called, the ridiculous one with the Japanese) terrible and gave up. They both relied on baddies coming up with super evil plan and then acting like idiots thereafter.
Kay
“Care more”.
All Right wing men are like this now. “No one is paying ATTENTION to ME! I am ANGRY about that!”
Ken
Fixed that for you.
EDIT: And I see from dr. luba‘s post, the cut-off has happened.
Kay
Did any you tell JD Vance he has to care about people? Yes? Well he’s SICK of that.
Himself and maybe his mom. That’s it. That’s the limit of caring.
Another Scott
@raven: Zooks!
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Kay:
100%. Biggest group of entitled whiners. So used to being the center of the universe.
Gravenstone
@Miss Bianca: “Hunt for Red October” and “Red Storm Rising” are entertaining for the genre. Several books later and he’d so thoroughly lost his own plot that his “everyman” CIA analyst protagonist had become president through an obscenely convoluted series of events.
Baud
@Kay:
I did. I’m sorry.
trollhattan
@J R in WV:
Guessing those AC-130 gunships, while they’re not sneaking up on anybody, make quite an impression on anybody unfortunate enough to be within their sight. The J version armaments:
1× 30 mm ATK GAU-23/A autocannon[101]
1× 105 mm M102 howitzer (AC-130J Ghostrider only as of 2017)[102][103][104]
‘Gunslinger’ weapons system with launch tube for AGM-176 Griffin missiles and/or GBU-44/B Viper Strike munitions (10 round magazines)[8]
Wing mounted, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs (SDBs), and/or GBU-53/B SDB IIs[8] (4 per hardpoint on BRU-61/A rack)
Holy shit.
Miss Bianca
@Gravenstone: Based on this and other recommendations that agree with your premise, I’ve decided to start with Red October and then go on to Red Dawn Rising and stop there.
Err…was “election” one of them?//
Kay
@Baud:
Why doesn’t he just quit? He’s at single digits. Because he doesn’t have a job other than making these stupid speeches? I suppose that’s our fault too. “And I’m SICK of not being a SENATOR”
West of the Rockies
@Sebastian:
More like a pencil sharpener.
Kirk Spencer
@Another Scott: Airborne is weird in every nation.
Note that my practical experience is 30-40 years ago (omg, I /am/ getting old). However I’ve stayed in touch with not only former soldiers but with sons and daughters of friends still jumping.
re the round chutes: they have a little bit of steering (slipping is the term used). We don’t give the soldiers doing mass insertions the steerable chutes sports and small team jumpers use because soldiers will steer them. In the crowded airspace of a mass (several hundred person) jump, that makes for a lot of mid-air collisions. Mid-air collisions are usually fatal, and this job is bad enough for that.
re jumping in a city – better a city than a forest. That said, the “acceptable” expectation of fatalities from a combat jump is, well, it’s ugly. We train these soldiers to have high initiative on the ground because there’s a really good chance they’re going to be working with gaps in the chain of command for a while.
That’s true of pretty much every nation, by the way. The actual firepower of an airborne battalion/regiment/division is small compared to that of their mechanized/motorized brethren. But they punch above their weight despite starting in absolute chaos because, well, they’re trained to be the chaos and they know it.
Now, rumor is that some nations’ airborne units are social specials, not trained specials. And rumor is that some nations’ airborne units aren’t really trained, they’re unfortunate ground-pounders who’ve been forced into a chute and are a hair short of panic. Again, at 30-40 years out of it I can’t say truth either way. In this case, I hope the rumor is true.
The Pale Scot
Red Storm Rising is a stand alone book about warfare between the Soviet Union and NATO. All the other books are in the Jack Ryan universe. For the present topic RSR is the one to read. Multiple generals, admirals were “HTF did he find all this stuff out?” at the time
Doug R
@Miss Bianca: Maybe have the alternate casting ready to go, then shuffle back if he comes back humbled?
dr. luba
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Oleksandr Usyk has returned to Ukraine after Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of the country by Russia.
The Ukrainian unified heavyweight champion of the world had been in the UK earlier this week, but has now flown home at a time when many others are fleeing.
J R in WV
@O. Felix Culpa:
Thanks for sharing that short but moving video from the capital of Ukraine. Ordinary people lined up to get their automatic rifles. Streets filled with people armed for war.
Makes the local Oath Keepers and such like seem like the total waste of time they really are. Men and women ready to fight for their freedom, together or singly. Heart warming and heart breaking at the same time. Sounds like they are actually winning so far!
Miss Bianca
@Kay: LOL – I think you’ve got this worthless mofo nailed dead to rights, Kay!
eclare
@Kay: That is a huge difference between D’s and R’s: D’s in office could easily do something else productive if they weren’t in office. Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, Val Demings, the list goes on.
What would MTG or Lil Marco do?
Uncle Cosmo
Not so much “fixed” as kindasorta updated – and for completeness’ sake you should’ve replaced “Soviet” with “Russian.” (FTR I have serious doubts as to whether the banking system cutoff could have collapsed the CCCP in the late 1970s – they were a lot closer to autarky then.)
One city destroyed in a thermonuclear fireball is certainly preferable to two – but none is infinitely better. Seventy-six years, 5 months and 17 days is a pretty good stretch to have gone without using an atomic weapon on human beings – let’s hope we can keep it going, hm?
Origuy
@Uncle Cosmo: That strategy goes back to the Romans, maybe further. The troops on Hadrian’s Wall came from Syria and Dacia, modern Romania, and a dozen other places.
trollhattan
@J R in WV:
Oath Keepers. Patooey. “Ah’d go fight Russians but they don’t look like Mexicans.”
dr. luba
@Kay: He has suddenly begun to care about Ukraine, and is upset Biden isn’t doing enough to help the poor suffering people of Ukraine.
Apparently he just discovered there are at least 80K Ukrainian voters in Ohio……
MisterDancer
@Miss Bianca: Not elected, but he gets there honestly. Strike on the Capital building during Joint Session, and Ryan (who was a confirmed cabinet member) ends up Designated Survivor.
VERY basically.
Gravenstone
@Miss Bianca:
Oddly, yes – as vice president. Then the president and most of Congress get immolated by a kamikaze 747, and voila President Ryan.eta: I stand corrected. It’s been several years since I read the book in question.
Cameron
@Kay: OMG! His mom? The Russians are assaulting Pigshit Holler?
Steeplejack
@Ken:
The translation agrees with what Google Translate gives me from a transcript. Here’s the actual video, in case zhena gogolia or someone else wants to translate it.
ETA: The speaker is Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic. One commenter says he was taken out of context, that he meant he wouldn’t fight against ordinary Ukrainians but would fight against “neo-Nazi Ukrainians.”
trollhattan
@Cameron:
Clearly, he’s using her for a strawmom.
O. Felix Culpa
@trollhattan: LOL. Good one.
Uncle Cosmo
@trollhattan: The book you reference is Rainbow Six (1998). I have a copy here somewhere that I kept for its peculiar form-factor (a cut-down-size hardback I bought in an airport for a European flight in case I didn’t care for the movie selection) and not its literary excellence. Clancy was one of those pro-forced-birth whackjob Irish Catholics, and it shows therein.
Clancy spoke at the meeting of my writers group one Christmas in the 1980s, and he said something that was useful for the time:
He went on to explain that once you found the (or “a”) person that knew what you needed to know, it was generally easy to get them to talk to you about it, and usually tell you much more than you were after. (Clancy’s pre-novelist career was “insurance salesman,” so presumably he had schmoozing down to a fine art.)
I kindasorta applied this during my government contracting days: One of the two most important skills I needed (and learned) was that of calling people who might know what I needed and if not might point me toward someone who did, blather, wince, repeat. I called it lucky when I got to the person who knew in four iterations or less. And then I needed to apply the other most important skill: Convincing him (or her) that it was in their interest, or at least not against their best interest, to tell me what I needed to know.
(You laugh. Working at Westinghouse I tracked down an expert on one of the company’s radars and when I asked him about it he replied, Why should I tell you? He explained that he kept his job because he was the expert on that radar, and if he told me everything he knew, the company would lay him off and put me in his position because I was younger and would cost them less. [I eventually narrowed my focus and he came through.]
(I thought that was pretty cynical – until the Circle-Bar-W staged a mass layoff in early 1991, and in my early 40s I was one of the youngest victims. [There was a class-action suit filed for age discrimination, but I don’t think it went anywhere, and in any case the corporation went belly-up a couple of years later.])
/tmi
** Of course now it’s the Internet and all that entails…
Steeplejack
@Miss Bianca:
Yes, Spinoza is recycling Twitter snark without attribution. I don’t remember if it was specifically DougJ.
Steeplejack
@eclare:
Well, the “stewardship,” not the ownership. Sounds like a legal dodge to me, but I read only one story about it this afternoon.
ETA: What @Yarrow said.
Another Scott
@Kirk Spencer: Thanks very much.
“Balloon-Juice! Is there anything it can’t do??”
Cheers,
Scott.
Uncle Cosmo
@MisterDancer: Distinction without a difference, perhaps… but in fact Ryan is named National Security Advisor and then becomes VPOTUS per the 25th Amendment when the incumbent resigns. Just minutes after his confirmation by Congress, he is spirited out of the joint session by the Secret Service, just in time to avoid being killed with POTUS and most of the Cabinet when the Japanese pilot kamikazes a 747 onto the Capitol (in Debt of Honor).
So yeah, he gets to the Oval Office legally, technically, but it really is a huge stretch – probably a kind of wish-fulfillment, as Ryan like Clancy grows up in a working-class family in Baltimore.
Steeplejack
@trollhattan:
Photoshopped—the Ukrainian as well as the English translations.
J R in WV
@Kay:
Isn’t this the guy who grew up with his GRANDMOTHER and then wrote a book about how shiftless all his other family members are???
Wha’ Happened?
Suddenly he’s worried about his mom???
Ken
(I am expecting some amount of R-on-R election fraud claims. Once the can of worms is opened, et cetera.)
Uncle Cosmo
@Ken: I guess he’s counting on Peter Steal to Thiel the nomination for him…or did I get that bass-ackwards…??