The more we find out about Communist China, the more there is to loath, despite all the globalist happy talk about a “flat” world where we could export manufacturing to China for lower costs without any negative consequence. Today’s example: A government propaganda video bragging about their mobile death vans.
“This is one of those times where I wish genuinely that I hadn’t found something. I just discovered something absolutely horrid.”
“These cars just show up and execute you.”
They used to have public executions in arenas. They haven’t done away with that (or shooting you on the side of the road and burying you in a ditch), but the death vans are considered more “efficient.”
“How [the government video] is framed, it’s like how would you be executed, this is going to happen to you. You’re supposed to enter this POV, this is from your perspective, how are you going to be taken out by the government?”
They make a point of how much more humane lethal injection is. “Look how nice we are!”
They talk about how much cheaper a mobile execution van is than a fixed execution center. “This is really good! It’s a cost-saving method when we need to go murder all those people!”
“China, even per capita, executes more people every year than every single country combined. And that’s just the people that they count…every year, China is executing thousands and thousands of people.”
One estimate has 8,000 people per year executed in China. (And that’s just the ones we have some evidence for. “Some people just get disappeared.”) By contrast, there were 18 death row inmates executed in the U.S. in 2022.
“It’s really grim and also very dystopian, the fact that when you’re strapped down and laying there, you’re looking up at the Communist Party of China’s insignia and right above that is a security camera.”
Remember: China has nothing like our legal system or the rule of law. They have a 99.9% conviction rate.
There’s a long list of crimes you can receive the death penalty for, including owning a gun or using a VPN. “If somebody wants you gone, you could get the death penalty for really anything.”
And the government video talks about the process of the lethal injection shutting down your organs.
Matthew Tye, the covering the video, lived in China for a decade. This is “how human life is treated on a political level in China…I think this gives you a perspective on how hard Chinese citizens have it.”
Some people figure things out slower than others. Such is the case with formerly lefty billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackerman, who is simply shocked to find out that Harvard has unquestionably embraced antisemitism and diversity in the name of DEI.
Here’s Dave Rubin excerpting Ackerman’s interview with Lex Friedman:
“The governance structure [of Harvard] is a disaster.”
“October 7th is the event that woke me up. Thirty student organizations came out with a public letter on October 8th, literally the morning after, this letter was created, and said Israel is solely responsible for Hamas’s violent acts.”
“Again, Israel had not even mounted a defense at this point, and there were still terrorists running around in the southern part of Israel.”
“And I’m, like, what is going on, you know? WTF, right? And that’s when I went up on campus and I started talking to the faculty, and that’s where I started hearing about ‘Actually, Bill, it’s it’s this DEI ideology.'”
“They started talking to me about this oppressor/oppressed framework, which is effectively taught at on campus, and represents the backdrop for many of the courses that are offered.”
“You know, I’m a pretty aware person, but I was completely unaware.” If you were “completely unaware,” then no, you’re not a “pretty aware person.” The malignancy of social justice has been know for at least a decade, and the hard left’s love for Muslim terrorists manifested itself at least as far back as the 1980s, when campus lefties loved the PLO almost as much as the commie Sandinistas. My guess is that by “a pretty aware person” you mean “you read the New York Times and watched a nightly MSM news broadcast, and stayed safely inside your real estate/hedge fund bubble, and never realized just how much your news sources were lying to you.” And all those PLO- and Sandinista-loving lefties now have their hands on control levers of the Democratic Party.
“They’re like ‘Look, Israel is deemed an oppressor and the Palestinians are deemed the oppressed, and you take the side of the the oppressed. And any acts of the oppressed to dislodge the oppressor, regardless of how vile or barbaric, are OK.”
“This is a super dangerous ideology.”
“DEI comes out of a kind of a Marxist, socialist backdrop way to look at the world.”
“Unfortunately it’s advancing racism as opposed to fighting it.”
As Dave Rubin notes:
Yes, his conversion is welcome, but again, conservatives (and even just anyone paying attention) has know what poison DEI/Critical Race Theory/Social Justice is for a decade. The #BlackLivesMatter/#Antifa riots didn’t make him think something just might be wrong with victimhood identity politics?
Bill Ackerman needs to go back and look at what else the left-leaning MSM has lied to him, about (including inflation, China, crime statistics, the Russian collusion hoax and and Donald Trump).
Something interesting is unfolding in the skies over Ukraine’s south-central front. Over the last ten days, Ukraine has managed to shoot down no less than 12 Russian military aircraft:
First the shootdown list:
“17th of February: Two Su-34s and a Su-35.”
“18th of February A Su-34”
“19th: A Su-34 and a Su-35”
“21st: A Su-34.”
“23rd: A Su-34 and an A-50.”
“27th: A Su-34 and a Su-34.”
“And today the 29th: another Su-34.”
For what it’s worth, Livemap says that Ukraine shot down two Su-34s today.
The Russian air force lost another Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber on Thursday, the Ukrainian air force claimed. If confirmed, the Thursday shoot-down would extend an unprecedented hot streak for Ukrainian air-defenses.
The Ukrainian claim they’ve shot down 11 Russian planes in 11 days: eight Su-34s, two Sukhoi Su-35 fighters and a rare Beriev A-50 radar plane.
But those 11 claimed losses are worse than they might seem for the increasingly stressed Russian air force. In theory, the air arm has plenty more planes. In practice, the service is dangerously close to collapse.
Exactly how the Ukrainians are shooting down so many jets is unclear. It’s possible the Ukrainian air force has assigned some of its American-made Patriot missile launchers to mobile air-defense groups that move quickly in close proximity to the 600-mile front line of Russia’s two-year wider war on Ukraine, ambushing Russian jets with 90-mile-range PAC-2 missiles then swiftly relocating to avoid counterattack.
But the distance at which the Ukrainians shot down that A-50 on Friday—120 miles or so—hints that a longer-range missile system was involved. Perhaps a Cold War-vintage S-200 that the Ukrainian air force pulled out of long-term storage.
It also is apparent the Ukrainians have moved some of their two-dozen or so 25-mile-range NASAMS surface-to-air missile batteries closer to the front line. After all, the Russians found—and destroyed with a missile—their first NASAMS launcher near the southern city of Zaporizhzhia on or before Monday.
He also suggests Russia may be flying more sorties close to the lines to follow-up on its costly victory in Avdiivka.
This surge in Russian sorties presents Ukrainian air-defenders with more targets. So of course they’re shooting down more Russian planes.
It helps the Ukrainian effort that Russian pilots increasingly are blind to Ukrainian missile-launches. The Russian air force once counted on its nine or so active A-50 radar planes—organized into three, three-plane “orbits” in the south, east and north—to extend sensor coverage across Ukraine.
In damaging one A-50 in a drone strike last year and shooting down two more A-50s this year, the Ukrainians have eliminated a third of this sensor coverage, and created blind spots where Russian pilots might struggle to spot approaching missiles.
In any event, the consequences of the Ukrainians’ recent kills, for the Russians, are dire. The Russian air force is losing warplanes far, far faster than it can afford to lose them. Russia’s sanctions-throttled aerospace industry is struggling to build more than a couple of dozen new planes a year.
Escalating losses, exacerbated by anemic plane-production, almost certainly are increasing the stress on the surviving planes and crews. The Russian air arm isn’t yet in an organizational death spiral. But it’s getting closer.
The numbers tell the story. On paper, the Russian air force has acquired 140 of the twin-engine, two-seat, supersonic Su-34s. Counting this year’s unconfirmed losses, the air force has lost 31 of the Su-34s.
But 109 Su-34s still is a lot of Su-34s, right?
Wrong, according to Michael Bohnert, an engineer with the RAND Corporation in California. Shoot-downs represent “only a portion of total losses” of Russian fighters, Bohnert wrote back in August. “Overuse of these aircraft is also costing Russia as the war drags on.”
“In a protracted war, where one force tries to exhaust the other, it’s the total longevity of the military force that matters,” Bohnert added. “And that’s where the VKS”—the Russian air force—“finds itself now.”
Bohnert assumed the air force went to war two years ago with around 900 fighters and attack planes and, in the first 18 months of fighting, lost around 100 of them to Ukrainian action. The problem for the Russians—besides the losses—is that the requirement for fighter and attack sorties hasn’t decreased even as the fighter and attack inventory has decreased.
So those 800 remaining planes are flying more frequently in order to handle taskings the Kremlin once assigned to 900 planes. And that means more wear and tear, deepening maintenance needs and a growing hunger for increasingly hard-to-find spare parts—imperatives that effectively remove airframes from the front-line force.
Given what we know of lax Russian maintenance practices, it’s probably safe to assume that considerably less of those 100 Su-34s are mission capable than would be the case in, say, the U.S. Air Force, which have mission-ready goals of 75-80%, but frequently falls short.
A few more weeks of disasterous losses like this and Russia will be at dire risk of having what remains of it’s air campaign collapse.
And Ukraine still has F-16s due to enter service this year.
Another dispatch from one of China’s ghost city developments, but this one with a twist: All the homes were theoretically designed for rich people, but I’m having a hard time figuring out why they would want them.
More than 100 uncompleted McMansions sit in Shenyang City some 400 miles northeast of Beijing.
They were “built by Greenland Group, one of the more than 50 housing developers that have defaulted on their debt in recent years.”
“Construction in 2010 but came to a halt a few years later.”
I know that China is a very different country indeed, but I can’t figure out why the developers thought that these McMasions, all made on the same floorplan and jowl by jowl next to each other on pretty small plots of land, would be appealing to the wealthy in the first place. They houses themselves are big and stylish enough in the 19th century French style they were aping, but the rich want land, space and differentiation, not to live between two houses exactly like their own on a small plot of land.
Yet another example of China’s inexplicable, wasteful policies…
Bijlmer, built as a planned neighborhood near Amsterdam, was supposed to be the “prefect city” of the future, with high rise apartment complexes surrounded with green space to make the buildings more warm and inviting for residents.
You know, just like they did with American public housing projects at the same time.
Bijlmer worked out just as well.
“The goal was space, green, and light.”
The place was laid out in hexagon structure, so I guess it would make a great wargame map.
“We have all the benefits of a dense wealthy neighborhood but with the empty space of a rural one.” Or so they thought.
The buildings were 11 stories high, with storage space at ground level and communal areas.
Transportation? The pitch: “Innovative three-tiered transportation system! Dedicated roads for cyclists and pedestrians! Separate roads for personal cars buses and trucks! An elevated metro line” into Amsterdam proper.
The reality: “There you can find a stray junkie who is illegally occupying one of the apartments. A lot of middle class people do not want to live in the Bijlmer. Our apartments are empty, our construction has been delayed, our metro isn’t finished yet, so the Bijlmer is separated and alone.”
“The Bijlmer did not attract the amount of people that were expected. Many households were turned off by the large, alienating high-rises, so they left for recognizable suburbs instead.”
Oh, and the prices were too high as well.
“A place that was intended to attract middle class families just didn’t. It attracted poverty. Instead the Bijlmer’s design and negative stigma created a self-fulfilling cycle. The nature alleys and parking garages helped criminals get away with crime and made people feel unsafe.”
And then the Dutch government turned the place into an immigrant ghetto for people fleeing Suriname. Want to guess how that worked out?
“Overcrowding made it impossible to take a bath at rush hour.”
Two-thirds of the high rises were eventually demolished.
I wonder if the video of the projected city was actually from the era. I doubt it, because it really gives off a Backrooms vibe.
Government urban planners always think they can always do a better job than the free market, and they’re always wrong.
Some of the Chinese news/videos because they’re important. But this story I’m putting up because it’s so ridiculous.
There’s evidently a genre of China’s video of pretty women in rural China carrying massive logs.
I know you’ll be shocked, shocked to find out there aren’t really lots of attractive women in rural China wearing makeup and carrying heavy logs around. Naturally, the logs are hollow or made of balsa. Naturally, they’re scamming poor simps (including some in the west) out of sympathy money.
The one the girls struggling through the mud in her old fashioned revolutionary clothing is particularly risible.
I wonder what American internet fads are inexplicable to the Chinese. Maybe they’re completely baffled by Hammurabi memes or Rickrolls…
Here’s an interesting follow-up to that two Bradleys wreck one T-90M post and video a few weeks ago. In this video, Task & Purpose provides more detailed breakdown of the engagement.
“In the interview with the Ukrainian Bradley commander Siri, he indicated that the three Bradleys made the conscious decision to seek out the Russian tank. However, one of their vehicles had issues and was not able to effectively engage the tank.”
The first Bradley engages the T-90M from a 90° angle, then both vehicles retreat.
The T-90 fires and misses. “Aiming at a target close to you in a tank becomes more difficult because you have to traverse the turret faster, and objects will move across your line of sight faster due to its close proximity.”
One under-appreciated factor: Turret turning speed. “In the 30ton MSA2 Bradley, the turret can spin 360° in about 6 seconds, or 60° per second…The most often cited metric I see [for the T-90] is about 9 seconds to do a full 360°, or about 40° per second.”
“They’re just 50 meters apart. This fight was essentially a ticking time clock for the T-90, because they had a very limited amount of time before the Bradley would manage to knock out their optics and blind them.”
“The T90 only had enough time to get off three cannon shots. The T90 has a stabilized turret and autoloader that can fire on the move with up to eight rounds per minute. The T-90 backed away from the road intersection while blindly firing through buildings.
“The Ukrainian Bradley does the same thing here, with its 25mm chain gun firing dozens of rounds while flooring it along the road away from the tank.”
The encounter took place in the town of Stepove, which is about 12km NW of Avdiivka, where some 40,000 Russian troops have been trying to take the pocket for months.
“Forbes reports that Ukraine’s knocking out 13 Russian vehicles here for every one that they lose.” But Ukraine may still have to fall back here.
“Most of the buildings are completely destroyed, but the rubble is going to be a major advantage for the Bradley’s to fire and then duck and weave behind for cover.”
“The next thing that happens is the T-90M fires off a smoke canister, which is a textbook act to conceal its position and disrupt the thermal sites in the Bradley. There different perspectives on what exactly happened when the smoke was set off. It appears like maybe one of the T-90’s explosive reactive armor pieces might have blown at about the same time, causing that large explosion that we see here. It could have also been from a misfire from the smoke grenade.” I’ve also heard the theory that the Bradley’s 25mm fire may have already damaged the smoke dispenser at this point, triggering the explosive misfire.
The physical damage to the T-90s turret may appear minimal to us, but to a Russia tank crew, it would like being inside a large bell being hit by a hammer. “The Russian tank crew would have been extremely disoriented by the blasts, even if the chances of that smaller caliber round penetrating was very unlikely. It’s easy to forget the human factor in these fights.”
The Bradley’s “M242 25mm bushmaster chain gun fires roughly 200 rounds per minute at the highest cyclical setting.”
“Inside the turret are two ready boxes which feed the linked ammo into the receiver. This gives you the ability to fire two different types of ammo on the fly. That includes the M919 APDST, or armor-piercing discarding sabo tracer depleted uranium round, and the M792 high explosive incendiary tracer rounds.” There’s a switch to change between the two.
“The Bradley’s anti-armor 25mm cannon round can penetrate between 30mm to 100mm of steel, depending on the angle at which the round strikes the target.”
“However, the Russian T90 reportedly has 400 to 900mm” of armor. Unmentioned here is that the T-90M (like the US, UK and Germany) uses composite armor rather than just steel.
So how did the Bradleys disable the T-90? Theory #1 is they destroyed both the commander and gunner’s optics. “If you’re able to hit them, then the crew is completely blinded and essentially combat ineffective.” Ukrainian commander Siri said he learned the tactic from War Thunder. (Are American tanks taking sufficient precautions to keep this from happening to them? To be fair, the chance of enemies getting a 25mm auto-canon this close to an Abrams seems…remote.)
Theory #2: Turret ring connection destroyed (much more likely electronics than hydraulics) sent the turret into auto-rotation as seen at the end of the video.
Why wasn’t the TOW missile not used? Maybe it wasn’t working, or maybe it was just too close for the TOW to arm properly.
The Bradley crew might have run out of APDST and switched to high explosive.
Russian tanks have slower reverse speeds than American armored vehicles.
There are some 78 Russian attacks a day in this sector. “Ukraine counterattacks with Bradleys, raking the tree lines with 25mm cannon fire. Bradley’s also transports small assault teams that clear out Russian stragglers from time to time. Once Stepove and the tree lines by the railroad are clear, or mostly clear, of Russian troops, Ukraine pulls back to their functional defensive positions and waits for the next Russian attack.”
There’s lots more interesting technical and doctrinal details I’ve cut for the sake of brevity.
The Fat Electrician has a tribute video for USS Texas (which is still undergoing refurbishment).
“Today we’re talking about the most gangsta battleship of all time: The USS Texas, predating both World Wars, being built in 1914.”
“It’s commonly referred to as the last dreadnought. But it’s not technically a dreadnought, belonging to the New York-class of battleswhips, which were commonly referred to as super-dreadnoughts.” It was a class of two, with only the New York and the Texas. There was a pre-dreadnought USS Texas laid down in 1889 and scrapped in 1911.
“They had the largest guns ever put on a boat up to that time. That would be the Mark 1, capable of launching two 14 inch shells that weighed nearly 1,600 pounds apiece. The USS Texas had five of them, two in the front and three in the back. It was like a freedom sedan.”
They also had ballistic calculators and analogue computers, making them the most accurate naval guns in the world at the time. Plus a whole bunch of smaller guns.
“It was the first ship in history to incorporate anti-aircraft guns.”
“As well as having a 12″ thick hull, an entire freedom foot of Pittsburgh steel. The only thing millimeters is going to do to that is scratch the paint.”
It was the first ship to have a compliment of Marines onboard. “They let the water grunts drive the biggest gun ever made.”
The USS Texas saw “almost no combat” in World War I. Via Wikipedia: “Texas’s service with the Grand Fleet consisted entirely of convoy missions and occasional forays to reinforce the British squadron on blockade duty in the North Sea whenever German heavy units threatened.”
“But it’s actions in World War II made it a naval legend.” Lots of newer, more powerful ships than the Texas, but the Texas was the only battleship to engage the enemy in all five theaters.
“D-Day, June 6, 1944. The Texas would take it’s position 12,000 yards off the coast of Normandy.” It fired 235 rounds at German fortifications in just under 54 minutes. “That is four hundred and eight thousand pounds of ammunition.”
“The Texan was shooting the enemy with about three spicy Volvos a minute.”
“I’m trying to tell you the Grim Yeeter over here bitchslapped the enemy’s coastline with an entire car dealership in the amount of time it takes you to watch a TV show.”
Continued bombarding until running out of ammo June 11, at which point it went back for resupply. By the time it was back, allied troops had driven the enemy so far inland its guns couldn’t reach. So it moved in to 3,000 yards, the closest it could get without beaching the ship.
“It’s at that point the Texas said ‘Hold my beer’ and flooded all the blister tanks on the starboard side, tilting the entire boat, changing the angle of the guns, allowing them to reach further inland.”
“They gangster leaned a 32 thousand ton warship so they could continue to engage the enemy. This might be the most grunterrific moment in world history.”
“It’s not technically a war crime. Geneva didn’t even necessarily know that shit was a fucking option.”
The Texas would go on to fight at Okinawa and Iwo Jima.
I haven’t been updating every twist and turn of the Evergrande collapse, but we’re going to look at it again because this Peter Zeihan video has a fairly staggering statistic. He asserts that there are 1.5 BILLION (with a B) unoccupied housing units in China. Even though we already knew about the ghost cities, that’s like an entire ghost nation for a China that was already headed down the economic crapper.
“A Hong Kong court has ruled that China’s largest property development group, Evergrande, is bankrupt and needs to be broken up. This is something that the Chinese government has spent a lot of effort on the last two years not happening.”
“There’s two big things that dominate the Chinese economy. The first is something I call hyperfinancialization: The idea that the government both de facto confiscates the savings of the citizen population so it can only go into projects funded by Chinese State Banks, as well as massively expanding the money supply to a tune of like almost triple what we have here in the United States.”
“It’s a public stability political control approach to finance. It’s not about profit, it’s about throughput, because throughput requires a lot of bodies.”
“Number one, you get companies like Evergrande, who gorge on all this bottomless supply of debt to build build, build, build, build, even if there’s no demand.”
“Second, you get a population who knows that their private savings is almost worthless, because the Chinese government is forcing them to keep it in the state banks, and they want to put it into a hard asset that preferably the state can’t control. And if they can’t get their money out of the country, then the next best thing is a hard asset in the country, which typically is property.”
“You have somewhere probably in the vicinity of 1.5 billion units in the country that have never been lived in, never will be lived in. So you’re talking about 100% overbuild, conservatively. Some estimates say it’s as high as three billion, which is just so far beyond stupid.”
“How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people,” said He Keng, 81, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau.
“That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can’t fill them,” He said at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan, according to a video released by the official media China News Service.
That’s people, not homes. Still, even if you cut it in half, to 750 million vacant condos, that’s a huge number. That’s the equivalent of 30 empty Shanghais.
Back to Zeihan:
“Evergrande going down means that their debts aren’t going to be serviced anymore, and the physical assets they have are going to be parceled up and foreign investors are going to be coming in seeing what bits that they can get.” Any foreigners investing in Chinese real estate need their heads examined.
“These things are things that the Chinese Communist Party would not normally allow to happen, so there’s a couple ways that this can go, none of them are good.”
“Option number one is we follow a western style bankruptcy and restitution program where this system is broken up and a lot of their assets are sold at pennies, maybe dimes, on a dollar.”
“You can count on private citizens being up in arms. I mean, the best estimate I’ve seen out of China is at 70% of total private savings is wrapped up in real estate, and most of these assets are worth no more than 10 cents on the dollar.”
“You have a fire sale of the single largest player which controls one sixth of the market, holy shit, things are going to get real very, very, very quickly.”
“Option number two is that the Chinese step in and abrogate the Hong Kong ruling. Now legally this cannot happen, but the Chinese Communist party is not really big on legal details when it comes to Hong Kong in particular.”
“Then Evergrande goes on some sort of state drip and everything with the system just kind of limps on, with the understanding now that Hong Kong has no legal authority over its own holdings, which will start an exodus of what few international firms are still there.”
“Regardless how this goes, don’t expect anything in the market to get better.”
“Evergrande may be the biggest player in this market, but it is by far not the only one who’s been doing stupid things like this, building condos that have no demand or running it like a Ponzi scheme. Every development company in the country basically operates this this way, and the second and third largest players in the industry are state-owned.”
“Even if all of a sudden this place were run by a bunch of Austrian economists, it’s too late.” Because of the one-child policy, there simply aren’t enough people of home-buying age.”
“I don’t want to say anything overly dramatic as ‘This is where it all starts to fall apart,’ because we’ve had a lot of things like that go down in the last 18 months. But this cuts to the core of what enables the average [Chinese] citizen to actually support the government, and there’s no way we move forward from this without a lot of side damage.”
The Chinese economy is already sucking. If the housing oversupply is really as bad as Zeihan makes out, China is in for an economic upheaval that makes 1929 look like a mild case of the hiccups.
Two videos on increasing Russian logistics difficulties in the Russo-Ukrainian War. First up: A video that suggests Ukraine has switched from a territory recapture strategy to an attrition strategy.
“Russia is burning whether it’s oil terminals on the Baltic and the Black Sea, factories in far-flung Siberia, or military bases in Crimea, it seems almost every day something bursts into flames in Putin’s backyard. And Ukraine is thought to be the one behind it.” It’s an open question whether structure hits in places like Siberia are Ukrainian “werewolf” teams operating behind enemy lines, or native anti-Putin/anti-war (or even anti-Russian) partisans, but the effect seems the same: Russia now has to worry about attacks to its military, transport, energy, and manufacturing infrastructure far from the frontlines in Ukraine.
Zelensky warned Putin that if Russia attacked Ukrainian cities with indiscriminate missile attacks again, Ukraine would hit back. When it did, “Ukraine struck back a fire at the electrical substation outside Moscow, plunged three districts of the capital into darkness. Water pipes also burst, leaving people freezing in their homes. The plague of accidents soon spread to the cities of Omsk and Novosibirsk, deep in Siberia, which were left without heating as temperatures fell below -2.” Actually, Omsk and Novosibirsk aren’t “deep” in Siberia, because the place is so vast there another five time zones east of there.
“Soon after attacks began on critical infrastructure, including oil refineries upon which Putin’s economy relies. To date, three refineries have been blown up or set on fire, including two which were hit by long-range Ukrainian drones. One of those the Ust-Luga oil refinery near St. Petersburg, is almost 600 miles from Ukraine.”
“Railways and factories have also been blown up or burned down at the same time the Ukrainians have stepped up their campaign against Crimea.” Naval successes we’ve covered here already skipped.
At this point the video argues that Ukraine’s strategy was to liberate Ukrainian territory, no matter the strategic value. I don’t think that was the case.
Following the “failure” of the summer offensive (I would say “limited gains”), “Ukraine is digging in and refocusing liberation of territory is no longer the main goal hitting Russia where it hurts most.”
“Ukraine knows that victory in a long war depends on two things above all else: The will of people to keep fighting, and the ability of the country to provide weapons for them to fight with, and that’s where these drone missile and sabotage attacks come in.”
It then argues (as many others have) that Crimea is Putin’s main weakness, and that losing it will cripple his prestige and ability to stay in power and continue the war.
I think there has been a shift in Ukrainian strategy, but that shift has mainly been driven by the development and availability of longer-ranged weapons Ukraine lacked earlier in the war, combined with the effects of a long-term campaign to degrade Russia air power, naval assets and SAM systems, opening up avenues for longer range strikes. Ukraine focused on attacking Russia’s logistics systems right after the Battle of Kiev was won, but now they have the capability to hit much deeper into Russia’s logistics infrastructure.
Actually, I’m surprised there haven’t been any reported attacks on the Trans-Siberian Railway, given what a long, slender link that is. A few medium-to-long range drone teams inserted into northern Kazakhstan or Mongolia could wreck real havoc on trains, lines, bridges, etc.
Next, a video from Kanal 13 (very much a pro-Ukrainian source) suggests that the war and sanctions are cratering Russia’s military industrial complex.
“The Russian military industrial complex is being destroyed because of the war against Ukraine.”
Dimitri Fidive, CEO of the Muram Machine Building Plant, wrote in an email intercepted by the activists, that inflation and the shortcomings of Russia’s bureaucratic approach prevents plants that form the country’s military industrial complex from fulfilling government orders.”
“Plants are forced to sell their goods at prices set in 2019, but are at the same time expected to purchase details at market prices and in advance.”
“The money received from the government was not enough to cover the interest on the credit that his firm would need to take out to pay its suppliers.”
“Money is tied up until the completion of the government contracts, which normally last 3 to 5 years, meaning during this time the money is effectively frozen.”
“There is a shortage of staff at the plants due to both mass mobilization and a lack of accommodation [housing] in the area.”
Hell of a way to run a railroad. One wonders how extensive these problems are with other companies in Russia’s military industrial complex
Ukraine’s strategy has shifted more in relation to the way the war developed, and the changing availability of western weapons, than any fundamental shift in strategy. It became apparent that this was going to be a war of attrition in the first year, and the question of which would break first: The west’s willingness to send Ukraine weapons, or Russia’s economy and ability to wage it’s illegal war of territorial aggression?
Nothing about that strategy has changed, only Ukraine’s greater reach to affect the latter.
