Russia’s Foreign Ministry warned Thursday that if the U.S. delivers sophisticated air defense systems to Ukraine, those systems and any crews that accompany them would be a “legitimate target” for the Russian military, a blunt threat that was quickly rejected by Washington.
As far as the Orcs are concerned, everything in Ukraine is a "legitimate target": Maternity hospitals, water works, schools, apartment buildings, public parks, nothing is exempt. So why wouldn't an air-defense system be off-limits?
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At this point, they're analogous to Monte Python's Black Knight.They appear to be a spent force but Ukraine thinks they're preparing something like Stalin's redeployment of the far east forces during Barbarossa.Question is what will the troops be equipped with.
No US boots on the ground. Training has to occur. A tid bit from next week's Economist:
Russia is massing men and arms for a new offensive. As soon as January, but more likely in the spring, it could launch a big attack from Donbas in the east, from the south or even from Belarus, a puppet state in the north. Russian troops will aim to drive back Ukrainian forces and could even stage a second attempt to take Kyiv, the capital.
Those are not our words, but the assessment of the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhny.
This might not be behind a paywall
https://www.economist.com/zaluzhny-transcript
I suspect that the "we're massing our forces, we're going to come for you" is a propaganda campaign aimed at persuading the Ukrainians to come to the bargaining table and give the Russians a cease-fire so they really can rebuild their forces, instead of having to do it piecemeal.
I also suspect that the Ukrainians will not do that. They've stood up to about the worst that the Russians can do with conventional weapons and they're not bending.
As for the rest of us, the arms and munitions factories should be running 24/7 to supply the Ukrainians.
While the mooted Russian offensive from the north, perhaps in February, is probably a decent possibility, the terrain in that border area is poor for an offensive. Additionally, with little no infrastructure that would support an offensive southward, the attackers would be very vulnerable to a flanking attack, perhaps up the Russia/Belarusian border and/or near the Ukrainian/Polish border. Add the paranoia of the Belarusians about the Poles and the Latvians/Lithuanians potentially taking advantage…
Maybe it's a holdover from the cold-war propaganda I was force-fed as a kid (both as a child and a boy suddenly becoming a man) but as a spectator event, I must confess to enjoying watching it implode, rather than explode. We have enough climate trouble right now without a nuclear winter, though that would be quicker than suffocating in our own flatulence.
What was it Pilotte said about the affair ... ?
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