It would be a very sad state of affairs if NATO basically used the Ukrainians to soak up as much damage as the Russians can inflict in order to weaken it, whilst giving only as little support as necessary, and by dragging the war on.
However it's clear that NATO is also mindful of the fact that Ukraine is currently well led by a capable democratic leader, but that might not be the case in a year or 2, so don't give them too many toys.
Saying that, as an armchair general I would like to see Ukraine driving a wedge to the west of Mariupol down to the sea, and a wedge just south of Kherson to surround the forces there. Secondly they could cross over into Russia via Bolgorod and attack the eastern forces from behind, whilst taking out as much military (including propaganda channels) and rail infra on the way.
The land bridge to Crimea should be reduced to rubble and the port at Sevastopol disabled.
Don't know that they have the man power for that, but that should give the old dictator something to worry about.
>>>It would be a very sad state of affairs if NATO basically used the Ukrainians to soak up as much damage as the Russians can inflict in order to weaken it
No one will openly state it but I'm confident this is the perspective in the US's halls of power. It's possibly the only thing the CIA and State Department have done right in the past ~25 years, and I think it's more a stroke of luck that the Russian military is surprisingly-incompetent than anything deliberate on our part. If Russia had performed as expected, this war would have been over in 72hrs and we'd be making excuses just like we did when our Afghan house of cards folded.
>>>Ukraine is currently well led by a capable democratic leader
>>>Don't know that they have the man power for that
Manpower isn't the problem. They don't have the munitions or the logistics to pull off such grand operational maneuvers. And moving large conventional forces into Russia itself would be a hugely destabilizing escalation. It would give Putin an excuse to actually mobilize his reserves, and give stronger justification for employment of tactical nuclear weapons (which people are already concerned he might use).
A larger scale attack in Russia near Bolgorod is a bit of a stretch and would give Putin an excuse to use tactical nukes, but insurgencies should work. I agree about the Kerch land bridge and the port disabled, the thing is that I don't know if they have the resources to do that.
> Never seen it discussed, but maybe the drone landed a bomb on the superstructure which knocked out their radar or other detection systems.
But that's also ridiculous: a cruiser, with full anti-air capabilities, would be disabled from an aerial bomb?
Missile-defense is harder than anti-air (especially vs slow, non-stealthy aerial drones). It makes far more sense that Moskva failed against the sea-skimming missiles, rather than the obvious drone in the vicinity.
Then again: the Moskva *should* have been able to disable the missiles.
I personally can't see how it would be best for either party.
Elon I would imagine is way too busy with his other concerns to be distracted by a social media company, even though at the moment it does seem to carry an oversized amount of influence.
And Elon's brand is probably too randomly 'firecracker' for a company that's probably already attracting scrutiny from governments across the world due to the above mentioned outsized influence it has on discourse and opinion.
Having a squiz at the first page of results on that question, seems like it’s a per capita thing of being a large country with few people. Also, “including exports”, which means all the coal etc and thing they export to China etc is being counted. I don’t want to say it’s an accounting trick but it feels like an accounting trick. 7% of global fossil fuel exports counted against 0.3% of the worlds population (8bill vs 27mill). Is it also counted against the importing country when they use it? Because that feels like double counting.
Bowler Hatted Interviewer: 'Well then, what do you know about these new fangled things then?'
Kipper tie: 'Well I saw one once being used on Logan's Run, and it looked quite easy. I'm also really into Led Zeppelin.'
Bowler Hatted Interviewer: 'Well you sound perfect. When can you start? Only, that spinning tape thing over there stopped spinning 2 days ago and I'm awfully worried we won't get our reports out for month end tomorrow.'
I'm also pretty impressed with the 'Over the Years' and 'Your Story' vignettes that my iPhone periodically creates, which was probably developed in direct response to that realisation that people take an incredible number of pictures (I know I do, especially since kids..) and very rarely actually consume them in any meaningful way.
I just wish it wouldn't select pictures of my ex-gf so often :/ Should probably delete them, but.. nostalgia.
I'd just save the ones I didn't want to see somewhere else not on the phone. That way, the ones that are good memories can stay, and the ones that aren't can just go.
I love these features, but am absolutely flabbergasted that Apple removed the ability to turn off the music that plays when you view the memory slideshow! It's not on-device music, it's not any sort of music that I chose, it's just some Apple-chosen soundtrack that I absolutely do not want, yet the only option is to turn my volume all the way down. I would label it hostile design.
The article actually mentions Alpine as one of the dist. where it's not supported by default:
>The following OSs do not support kTLS, for the indicated reason:
>Alpine Linux 3.11–3.14 – Kernel is built with the CONFIG_TLS=n option, which disables building kTLS as a module or as part of the kernel.
and even recommends building OpenSSL and Nginx 3.0 yourself anyway, so looks like it will be a while before this might be available out-of-the-box for most major dists. But of course everything is OSS so you can DIY if you don't mind getting some ./configure under your fingernails :)
I personally see no evidence Ukraine is exhausted, although their country has, and continues to receive a pummeling - ironically largely in the more Russian speaking parts to the south and east.
Russia on the other hand will of course work hard to adapt, but they are about to learn that they will be ostracized and blocked at every turn when they try to reintegrate with the rest of the world. No longer will their oligarchs get to jet around the world with their outsized wealth, no longer will Russian propaganda be accepted as 'valid discussion' and their activities overlooked and hopefully no longer will Russian money be accepted to influence politics.
The mask is off now and the snarling beast underneath can be seen - hopefully now by all.
> I personally see no evidence Ukraine is exhausted
There are news of a few fuel stores blown up by Russians every day. This limits Ukrainian mobility greatly. Ukraine has not been able to regain any significant territory despite the majority of Russian army being concentrated around Mariupol. Russian army makes advances in Mariupol step by step and after that will be free to attack other parts of Ukraine. Whether it will is going to be a decision of one man.
> they are about to learn that they will be ostracized and blocked at every turn when they try to reintegrate with the rest of the world
With the rest of Western world to be precise. Yes, isolation of Russia from the West is likely to succeed (although I see threats to this as well in Hungary, Germany and France). But it is open whether it will be enough to restrain Russia's military power in the long term.
Isolation was just the start of the first Cold War, and is probably a start of the new one. Winning it was, and still is a non-trivial challenge.
>Computers suck at networking. ... The day you network two computers together is the day you've opened yourself up to a world of hurt.
This is actually a pretty insightful comment, and something I haven't thought about in a number of years since networking disparate machines together to create a system in now so second nature to any modern software that we don't think twice about the massive amount of complexity we've suddenly introduced.
Maybe the mainframe concept wasn't such a bad idea, where you just build a massive box that runs everything together so you never get http timeouts or connection failed to your DB since they're always on.
Seeing Ukraine's large expanses of flat land with dotted woodland I also thought that squads on quad-bikes (electric to be silent) would be a very effective way of moving about and inflicting lots of damage behind the front-lines.
Kind of how the original British SAS got started I believe.
However it's clear that NATO is also mindful of the fact that Ukraine is currently well led by a capable democratic leader, but that might not be the case in a year or 2, so don't give them too many toys.
Saying that, as an armchair general I would like to see Ukraine driving a wedge to the west of Mariupol down to the sea, and a wedge just south of Kherson to surround the forces there. Secondly they could cross over into Russia via Bolgorod and attack the eastern forces from behind, whilst taking out as much military (including propaganda channels) and rail infra on the way.
The land bridge to Crimea should be reduced to rubble and the port at Sevastopol disabled.
Don't know that they have the man power for that, but that should give the old dictator something to worry about.