Putin evidently expected his “special military operation” (i.e., his illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine) to be over in three days. In a grim milestone and testament to wide-ranging Russian incompetence and the superiority of NATO weapons and Ukrainian ingenuity, that conflict just hit the 1,000 day mark.
Ukraine marked 1,000 days of war with Russia on Tuesday since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” on Feb. 22, 2022, and initiated the largest conflict Europe has seen since World War II.
It isn’t only the scale of the fight that has resembled the infamous war that ended more than 75 years prior to Putin’s invasion. Parents loaded their children onto trains in the early days of the war, veins of trenches have scarred eastern Ukraine, and cities and towns have been completely decimated by air, land and sea-based bombardments.
But the war has done more than remind Western leaders of the global repercussions that come when major nations enter into mass conflict. A new type of warfare emerged out of the fight in Ukraine and the reliance on cheaply made drones to target cities, troop locations and military equipment that cost millions, cemented a new era in combat strategy.
The war has been a war crime for Russia, a bloody tragedy for Ukraine, and a resounding success for NATO, as Russia has used up the majority of the weapons and equipment it inherited from the Soviet Union. Russia has been grinding away for the last two of those years for what have essentially been infinitesimal gains at high cost.
Not to mention the damage to the Russian economy. Interest rates are at 21%, the ruble is worth a penny, commodity prices are soaring, and corporate bankruptcies.
Some think Trump is going to bail out Putin, but Trump sees everything from a negotiating/persuasion/bargaining perspective (along with tit-for-tat game theory), and Trump’s strategy is to threaten what his opposite number holds most dear before dangling a carrot.
I predict that any Trump-led negotiations will be…interesting.
Tags: Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine
Unleashing the fossil fuel industry is one of the best ways to hurt both Russia and Iran (it would actually help China, but that’s where he could break out the targeted tariffs once again). I’ve seen ample anecdotal evidence that Russia is running low on certain military stockpiles, and their economy may (finally!) reach a tipping point next spring/summer. It would also be ideal if Trump could put pressure on certain international CAD/CAM/CNC firms whose products (and ongoing software support!) are the only way for Russia to continue to build advanced airframes for planes and missiles.
You really need to add context to your economic and productive analyses of Russia.
Russian Federation corporate bankruptcies have risen by 20% thus far during 2024. American corporate bankruptcies have doubled during the very same period.
You should buy groceries some time to get a feel for American food inflation over the last three years. It was a major factor in the Democrats’ losses on November 5th among the working classes.
The Russian Federation massively increased their weapons production in 2023. It produced over 1,500 tanks, over 1 million large caliber artillery shells, and 22,000 drones. These numbers are at least three times larger than all of NATO’s output, combined. Their missile production now outstrips that of the USSR and Russian Federation at any time prior to the current war.
It is the depth of stupidity to wage economic warfare with sanctions against an autarkic federation like Russia. Russia mothballed their share of the USSR military industrial complex during the 1990’s. Every member of NATO destroyed their own military industrial complexes during that decade. The Russian military industrial complex snapped back immediately in late 2022 as they rehabbed their military factories. The NATO blowhards are making projections of what they can do, maybe in 2026.
Reading this, I’m reminded of a trip I once took up to Las Vegas while I was stationed at Fort Irwin. One of my acquaintances at the time was a “playa”, and he finally talked me into going up to Vegas to at least look at the place and try to understand the attraction for him. He was a gambler; nothing big, but he liked the atmosphere and kept his gambling fairly safe and sane.
The weekend I went up with him, he got us into a high-end part of one of the casinos, where they fleece the millionaires and expats from China and the Middle East. While we were in there, just checking the scene out, there was a bit of a “frenzy” at one of the tables. High-stakes poker was being played… And, one of the players was a guy with more money than sense; he kept going all-in on everything, like he had the US Treasury backing him or something. The bets he was making were insane; he was so far over his head it wasn’t funny, and the wiser people observing the whole thing were tut-tutting about how he was bankrupting himself. They all knew better, knew that the cards weren’t going to magically turn around for him, and the eventual denouement was that he blew something well north of a million dollars in chips when he busted out.
That’s the situation with Putin and Russia, right now. The realities of him having burnt through most of his legacy hardware, an entire generation of young men and workers, along with the economic and other effects…? And, for what? What territory has he managed to take, what economic gains will he accrue from it? Mariupol, once one of the largest steel plants in Europe, lays in ruins. He can’t even afford to begin rebuilding it, either. His fleet has been driven from the Black Sea by a nation that doesn’t even have a real navy, and the end state for where this all winds up is… What?
Putin keeps doubling-down on a disastrous series of wagers, and he’s eventually going to bust out and be left there at the table while the house is totting up its bill. Christ, he’s metaphorically borrowing chips from North Korea, of all places… Where does that end, pray tell?
We’re a thousand days into this thing, and if he was going to “win”, he had to do it in a week, inclusive of occupying Kyiv. That didn’t happen, so why the hell is he persisting?
I speculate “insanity” or “Alzheimers”. Even if he “wins” by somehow convincing Ukraine and the world to let him keep what he’s taken so far, he’s going to have lost far more than he gained. All the stored value inherent in that old Soviet hardware? Pfffft. Gone. All the manpower? Gone. All the funds spent on the war, instead of fixing and improving the national infrastructure? Gone.
Wait for this winter; see what happens. There hasn’t been any investment in the heating plants or other major necessities for living in Russia under Russian conditions. Observe what happens, come December-January; will the heating plants and the lines remain functional, or will hundreds of thousands of Russians be left freezing in the dark? And, for what? A few kilometers of Ukrainian farmland?
“We’re a thousand days into this thing, and if he was going to “win”, he had to do it in a week, inclusive of occupying Kyiv. That didn’t happen, so why the hell is he persisting?”
Attritional warfare, a Russian specialty.
At some point in late 2022, Putin determined that he could thoroughly degrade the military power of the United States. Admiral Samuel Paparo confirmed yesterday that our stockpiles of advanced weapons have fallen well below critical levels. We are no longer able to supply Ukraine, Israel, and have a meaningful war reserve for the coming Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
The Russian Federation is replenishing their weapons as they use them; at considerable cost to their economy, but a cost they are bearing successfully. Why they are experiencing significant inflation.
We, on the other hand, are running down weapons stocks without replacing them. It will take a decade to replace the Patriots, Javelins, HIMARS and the other advanced missiles fired off in Ukraine. Those replacements will come with costs our economy cannot bear, so they will not happen.
I think you might want to rethink your thesis. The majority of those weapons you’re talking about? They age out, and have to be replaced or refurbished periodically. From my understanding of what we’ve actually shipped over there, most of it was overdue for replacement.
Which isn’t to say that the weapons stocks aren’t low, because the idjit class we have running this country keeps doubling down on “peace dividend” BS, reducing stocks and industrial capacity. Time was, we could turn out something like a hundred thousand 105mm and 155mm shells per month. Today? We’re lucky if we can hit 30,000 with all the “new factory machinery” stuff we “invested in”.
Lockheed was building 350 Patriot PAC-3 MSE missiles a year in 2021 and was ramping up production to 500 missiles a year when Russia invaded Ukraine,
Lockheed is now fully funded by NDAA to build 550 PAC-3s a year at its Camden, Arkansas, production line, but production constraints have limited it to a rate of just less than 500 per year.
War with Russia or China will require hundreds of Patriots a month, quantities we simply cannot make. AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) production is maxxed out at just over 1,000 per year; well less than Ukraine’s monthly firing rate for the ground-based National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS). But at least the Patriot and the AAMRAM are in low rate production. No new Javelins will be made until some time in 2026. No ATACMS can be made, period.
So much for replacement theory. Read Admiral Paparo’s speech to the Brookings Institution yesterday.
Did you intentionally leave out that the ATACMS “can’t be produced anymore” is due not to some mystical inability to build them, but because it’s been supplanted and replaced by the PrSM?
Or, are you just that f*cking ignorant of the issues, here?
You are a perennial source of “Oh, woe is us…” on the issues surrounding Ukraine and an equally consistent source of “Russia Stronk”. When is it going to penetrate your skull that the Russia you believe in ain’t the Russia that actually exists, and that you, quelle horror, might be wrong? Worried about those FSB disinformation checks clearing?
The Russians are doing another one of those things that consistently reoccur throughout their history, which is generating a projection of strength while actually failing. In WWI, all the Allies were certain that the “Russian Steamroller” was going to come to their rescue on the Western Front: Indeed, they’d predicated their involvement in the war and their strategy on that idea.
In the event? The vaunted Russian Steamroller wound up laying dead on the eastern approaches of the German and Hapsburg empires, without ever doing much more than managing the impressive slaughter of their own people and destroying their own nation. The major difference between Putin and Tsar Nicholas is that Putin started out with much better material resources, and has still managed to piss it all away.
The “Brusilov Point” cannot be too much further off, as he runs out of chips to double-down with. He’s gone to Iran for missiles (and, the technology to build them!!) and North Korea for troops and artillery ammunition. The ammunition has gained a terrible reputation for “quality control” in Russian use, and the North Korean troops have yet to make any impact on the battlefield. When they do, I rather doubt that they’re going to be at all impressive.
Right now, the PrSM is ‘vaporware’. It has not been officially fielded and there are reasons to believe that it is experiencing severe teething problems. DoD has refused orders from NATO allies, a sure sign that it doesn’t work. A major program improvement is planned for 2025, which is quite suggestive for a system whose first (very small) batch was delivered less than a year ago.
ATACMS was supposed to provide the Army with short range fires until PrSM was sorted out. Now they are left in the lurch, because they cannot make new ATACMS or rehab existing OOD missiles.
A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.
“In the event? The vaunted Russian Steamroller wound up laying dead on the eastern approaches of the German and Hapsburg empires, without ever doing much more than managing the impressive slaughter of their own people and destroying their own nation.”
You really should read Norman Stone’s ‘The Eastern Front 1914-1917’. Alexi Brusilov knocked the Austrians out of the war and crippled the Germans by forcing them to strip 50+ divisions from their other fronts to plug the gaps left by the Austrians.
Your “Brusilov Point” is an complete fiction. Starvation was the proximate cause of the Russian Revolution. The Russian Army stripped manpower and horsepower from their farms to flesh out their armies. The Germans deliberately drove 10 million refugees into Russia which had to be fed. Russia was producing less than half of the food necessary for it population. The Tsar and his ministers were oblivious, as was the Provisional Government.
“You really need to add context to your economic and productive analyses of Russia.“
Germany defeated France in six weeks.
“You really need to add context to your economic and productive analyses of Russia.“
Alexander conquered the world in five years. Your boy is coming up a little short, no?
Pootie will be long dead before he sees any significant territorial gain in Ukraine.
Would this be a good time to point out that meat assaults are now being carried out in Ladas because of a shortage of BTRs, much less BMPs? And then, there’s Russia’s demographics, which were already in steep decline; without Ukraine and the ‘stans to help bolster their cannon fodder, I don’t think they really have enough people left anymore to repeat their WWII performance (and that was only really possible thanks to Lend-Lease logistics). If companies like Siemens were to be forced to remotely turn off their milling machines in Russian arms factories, missile and airframe production would crash. And then, there’s the little issue with the Russian economy and its all-important rail network.
Also, weapons that have not been delivered (at all) to Ukraine include:
PRSM (as above)
Any unitary-warhead ATACMS (which is most of them)
SDB (except for a small number of new-build GL-SDB)
SDB2
JAGM
JSOW
JASSM (the USAF has a few *thousand* on hand)
Plus, the USAF alone has something like 100,000+ JDAM kits. That’s… a lot. And in a non-nuclear fight, a couple hundred of them could take out every meaningful road and rail bridge in the theater and cut the armies off from their supplies within a few days.
Frankly, the misallocation of effort in the Red Sea (going after the Houthis rather than their Iranian masters) has been more detrimental towards key stockpiles than Ukraine has; it doesn’t help that the USN seems to be less interested in building large stockpiles of advanced munitions than the other services.
Less than 10 PrSMs have been produced, and they have been used for testing. Lockheed stopped serial production for some unstated reason. It hasn’t even been assigned an ‘M’ designation number, which is a very bad sign.
Russian EW systems have successfully deflected most GPS guided American and NATO munitions, including later ATACMS, SDBs, GL-SDBs, and the JDAM kits. The Russians have actually been able to retarget GL-SDBs in flight and direct them to Ukrainian strongpoints. Lockheed, Boeing, and SAAB are urgently trying to improve anti EW countermeasures.
Due to the effectiveness of Russian EW systems, DoD has been prioritizing older, inertially guided weapons systems, in their Ukrainian aid packages. They only made about 100 inertially guided M39 ATACMS before adopting GPS guidance, and most of those have been expended. Most current Ukrainian ATACMS strikes using later variants fail.
Ukraine has received quantities of the AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon, but there have been no reports of their usage. The AGM-158 JASSM ought to work, but has such a checkered past that DoD may not have much faith remaining in this system.
And “Boom” goes the Storm Shadow as another Russian General joins the Departed Defenders of the Glorious Revolution.
https://en.defenceua.com/news/confirmed_elimination_of_russian_generals_in_maryino_kursk_region_by_storm_shadow_missiles-12609.html
Malthus –
Your hyperlink is some kind of cyberfraud. It redirects to “mytrendtales dot com”.