Re: Posted by: alek_a | Dec 11 2023 7:49 utc | 89

Uhmm, how about no. You just posted the very definition of terrorism.

No, it’s not.
If they are producing weapons being used on the battlefield that are killing people they are legitimate targets to be taken out.
They know this – it is part of the calculus from profiting from the death and destruction of other humans.
It’s a wonder to me it isn’t used more frequently.
Just take out all the CEOs of the big military industrial contractors on a week and watch the calls for peace grow and the fervor for war abate.
I can only assume Russia wants the war to continue for its own reasons.

Posted by: Julian | Dec 11 2023 12:10 utc | 104

Is there any thinkable defence against drone swarms?

Posted by: zorge | Dec 11 2023 12:32 utc | 106

MSM is still showing titles like this:
“Yahoo: Footage released from scene of murder of collaborationist and former MP Illia Kyva – photo, video”
Killing for Ukraine is quite normal for enlightened Western intellectuals.
Is it not clear to Kremlin that this is a total war? The negotiations would not be only stupid, but impossible.

Posted by: zorge | Dec 11 2023 12:44 utc | 108

This might make you laugh. It’s from an idiot who wanted to take away Russian nuclear weapons in July and is now terrified at the prospect of Russian victory:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/09/putins-russia-is-closing-in-on-devastating-victory/

Has this imbecile never heard, or does he imagine his readers never heard, of Minsk II?

Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Dec 11 2023 12:58 utc | 110

Source: https://t.me/NovichokRossiya/42845
I said yesterday as a joke that they’d raid hospital convalescent wards next, but I don’t think it’s a joke any longer.

Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Dec 11 2023 13:23 utc | 112

“… the worst the EU can do is refuse to sell you their stuff.”
Posted by: Echo Chamber | Dec 10 2023 21:01 utc | 52
EC – they can also refuse to buy yours. Given the size of the trading bloc the EU controls that’s a significant threat. Worked with the UK during the Brexit negotiations. Didn’t work with Russia.
……………………
Posted by: 600w | Dec 10 2023 19:58 utc | 48
600W. The AFD is the only party I know of in Germany some members of which openly acknowledged that their government was supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Was it also the only party in the Bundestag that pointed out that sending German Panzers to the Donbass for the second time in 80 years was dumb?
I think it was. So the AFD may be bad news. They may not. I don’t know. But at the very least those two facts show there are a few in Germany who keep their eyes open. In that respect Germany is markedly in advance of any UK politicians I know of.

Posted by: English Outsider | Dec 11 2023 13:39 utc | 114

Posted by: Robert Hamilton Camp | Dec 10 2023 17:50 utc | 35
Hi Rob. Thanks again for your weekly updates. One note: It was the German president, Steinmeier, the one left waiting for half an hour for someone to welcome him in the tarmac in Qatar, not Blinken in KSA.

Posted by: Johan Kaspar | Dec 11 2023 14:43 utc | 116

By my reading, Trumpeter is suggesting the precise targeting of those individuals directly involved in the production and development of munitions (drones). I find it hard to ascribe any degree of innocence to these individuals. The Pavlovian object-lesson seems fairly straightforward.
Have not the US and IS specifically targeted Iranian Nuclear scientists for assassination? (oh wait, they’re the Rules-Based-Order team. They’re allowed.)
I don’t condone it, but the logic is unassailable.
Posted by: retroflecks | Dec 11 2023 8:49 utc | 93
Why go for small fry? I think the day you see RF has declared all out war you’ll see a lot of Fortune500 CEOs having accidents.

Posted by: Newbie | Dec 11 2023 14:50 utc | 118

Key to drones is that they really push war into attrition mode. You want destruction of drone to be much cheaper than cost of manufacture of drone. Which is why I think automated shotguns (obviously, military grade if going after bigger drives, not ordinary hunting shotguns) is the best idea, because a bunch of steel pellets (why waste money on lead?) is cheap, as is the firing tube and the computer to run the thing autonomously.
What’s not cheap is building a million mounted on ATVs, so as to cover the whole 2000km front. Maybe price could be brought down by Chinese to $20000 per vehicle, so $20 billion. Not much in context of major war.
Same principle applies to defense against rockets and big aircraft: you shoot something up in the air to knock down the thing that is attacking by air. As long as total cost of defense (cost of defense installation plus ammunition fired plus cost of damage by those missiles and aircraft that get through the defense) is less than cost of offense, you win the war of attrition.

Posted by: anonposter | Dec 11 2023 15:12 utc | 120

“As a very cohesive group, Jews have long memories.”
Yet Hutterites, Mennonites, Doukabors, etc. moved out of Russia. The Jews that did leave Russia were not unique.
And I wonder how many former Russian Jews believe they are the only ones with a long memory.
While they are exercising the idea of Might is Right, have they or anyone else considered what the future will hold with that crude tool.

Posted by: kupkee | Dec 11 2023 15:31 utc | 122

Where the swarm tech gets interesting is when it gets cheap commercial applications.
Imagine a swarm programmed to take out the engines of a Boeing 737 Max. With some notable passengers onboard.
Because the plane is not aerodynamically stable a glide landing won’t work.
Hello, death spiral.

Posted by: Ghost of Zanon | Dec 11 2023 15:55 utc | 124

Give the Houthis drone swarms.
Extra popcorn, please.

Posted by: Ghost of Zanon | Dec 11 2023 16:19 utc | 126

Posted by: Squeeth | Dec 11 2023 11:53 utc | 102
Mearsheimer’s a great scholar and courageous with it. But he himself acknowledges that his take on international studies and of great power relationships is macro. He doesn’t do what he calls local “area studies”. He leaves that to the specialists in that field. He know those studies are important of course but tends not to do them himself. Hence he acknowledges that his predictions will only be correct in some 70% of cases.
The reasons for the current war fall squarely into the 30% he doesn’t cover. The expansion of NATO, the largely ignored expansionary drive of the EU with the always ignored security implications of that, the siting of missiles and the frequency and size of NATO military exercises, the clear hostility of the West to the RF – all those factors are essential background but they do not account for the Russian military action on 24th February 2022.
They cannot possibly account for that action. It was predictable that any military move by Russia would bring on sanctions. That those sanctions were ultimately beneficial to Russia is true. Nevertheless, risking incurring sanctions of that weight is not what the Russians at the time would have done willingly. They were already moving their trade away from Europe and doing so in a gradual and non-disruptive manner. Why would they wish to do it in a manner that might risk being dangerously disruptive? That they were well-prepared for the sanctions did not mean they wished to court them.
So too for the “NATO Pressure” reasons given for the Russian military action on that February 24th. Yes, there were strong NATO pressures but it was predictable that Russian military action could only serve to increase them! As it has. If the Russians wish to reduce the extent to which NATO Europe is used as a military threat against them, they will do so by economic means. They will weaken the EU economy by means of letting supply contracts run out. Invading a neighbouring country – for that is what the SMO was – is scarcely a logical way of getting other neighbouring countries to scale down their own defence arrangements. And again, that the Russians were far better prepared for the SMO than we knew at the time (the general view that they were not is wrong) does not show that they wished to implement it.
No. The SMO cannot be regarded as a rational response to increasing NATO pressure. Mearsheimer and those who advance similar arguments are wrong. The SMO was guaranteed to increase that NATO pressure and has. Putin let his generals loose that February because it was the only way of warding off the threat the Kiev forces posed along the Line of Contact. And there we need the local “area studies” specialists to examine the military situation along that Line of Contact at that time.
Minsk 2 had failed. The shelling was increasing. The LDNR forces by themselves were not capable of repelling the stronger Kiev forces. Had the Kiev forces entered the Donbass republics they would have been exceedingly difficult to dislodge from the urban centres. And given that those Kiev forces contained a number of ultra-nationalist units who were explicitly set on clearing out the Russian inclined inhabitants of the Donbass, we would have seen atrocities and ethnic cleansing on a scale that would have dwarfed the atrocities of the ATO. It would have been irresponsible of Putin had he not acted to ward off such a threat.
The SMO, then, was a forced moved. A pre-emptive strike to deal with the threat posed by the Kiev forces. My own guess is that it was a forced move Putin was most reluctant to make. Economically, politically, geostrategically, things were going his way in any case. He did not need a war for that.
Further, it seems obvious that from well before that February we were doing whatever we could to provoke the Russians to military action. What was HMS Defender doing but that, according to the documents publicised at the time by the BBC. We were saying to the Russians “Come out and fight” in order to give us reason for the sanctions it was hoped would finish them off. They did. We lost. It’s time now to pick up the pieces.
–
……………………………………………
It follows from this that all the great mass of debate we see about Putin and the nature of the Russian state is irrelevant. Whatever our view of Putin and the Russians, we have to accept that he had no choice but to authorise the SMO and would have failed in his duty had he not done so.
This was no “unprovoked” war, as the Western politicians would persuade us and have sought to persuade us from the start. It was provoked, deliberately provoked by us in the West. FAFO, as some percipient American commentators have remarked. We “fooled around” on the Line of Contact. We have now found out the consequences.
As the Rand Corporations said, in the famous study commissioned by the State Department, “Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in U.S. military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages.
<“>https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html>
We can scarcely say we weren’t warned.

Posted by: English Outsider | Dec 11 2023 16:20 utc | 128

https://t.me/Slavyangrad/78707

🔴 The frigate Admiral Kasatonov just a few days ago completed modernization to enable the use of Zircon hypersonic missiles.
This ship can carry 16 Zircons.

https://t.me/intelslava/53711

🇺🇦Shelling of the Avdeevka coke plant, where the positions and warehouses of the Ukrainian group defending Avdeevka are located.

https://t.me/remylind21/10605

Powerful footage of the operation of an entire battery of Grad MLRS, 6 vehicles at once.
It will be a fun night at the Ukrainian Armed Forces positions.
#from_the_battlefield

https://t.me/milinfolive/112303

Another successful aerial ramming of the Ukrainian heavy drone-bomber “Baba Yaga”.
The Russian copter came at the enemy from above and hit the propeller blades, thereby knocking the Ukrainian drone off its trajectory. In the final frames you can see another successful ramming of the enemy Mavik and its fall to the ground.

Posted by: anon2020 | Dec 11 2023 16:48 utc | 130

YetAnotherAnon | Dec 11 2023 15:27 utc | 121
*** Also, do you really want even greater amounts of lead scattered over the landscape? I know it’s happened through history, but it strikes me modern weaponry can deposit a lot more lead than the old stuff could.***
selectively sized gravel?

Posted by: Cynic | Dec 11 2023 19:21 utc | 132

Uk & Norway announced a “coalition” to aid Ukraines non existent Navy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/uk-to-send-two-royal-navy-minehunter-ships-to-ukraine/ar-AA1llrdu#image=AA1llFqw%7C2
“The UK has pledged to Ukraine two ships specifically designed to hunt down naval mines.
Would Turkey be stupid enough to let them traverse Bosporus Strait for transfer??
Nevertheless, a couple of kinzals will greet them…
Announcing the transfer, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said the vessels would help Ukraine reopen ‘vital export routes’ otherwise choked by Russia since Putin’s full-scale invasion.
The Ministry of Defence has also said it will be launching a ‘maritime coalition’ with Norway and other partners to ramp up support for Ukraine’s naval capabilities. ”
“…..on when or how the ships will be able to enter the Black Sea, given access through the Bosphorus is controlled by Turkey – a Nato-member country that nevertheless maintains strong trade relations with the Putin regime.
News of the transfer came a day after the government also announced £3.7 million in funding to support the documentation and investigation of war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, building on a previous pledge of up to £2.5 million. “

Posted by: Trubind1 | Dec 11 2023 22:17 utc | 134