Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
No_One would never have eaten humble pie. The reason I started posting on this forum was seeing No_ones post about stealth and radars that is cribbed straight from anti-US pro-russian slop about how X band radar reflecting off mountains or clouds can defeat frontal stealth and how IRST proves US stealth is inferior so Russia wins automatically. His responses involved special pleading of "you and i aren't privy to the inner workings of UAC AS the technology is secret so thats how we know it works" type of wishful thinking. Its pure cope straight out of ArmchariWarlord or BigSerge except without the tells of self-insert heroism or dour prose that makes those idiots at least amusing to read. No_ones takes were pure regurgitations of the lowest effort leavings of NCD without the courtesy of logical follow through supposedly the standard of this board or at least being amusingly wrong which is the standard of the internet.
I will almost miss his favorite conspiracy theory about Euromaidan, which hinged on false-flag protestors shooting into the crowd to turn the crowd against the police, which was coupled with his most adamant refusal that there was no way the Ukrainian security state opposed to the protestors would ever be the ones managing those false-flag attacks in order to provide the police a pretext for the crackdown the security state had been lobbying for (because no nationalist would ever do such a thing, donchaknow).
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
If we're doing a retrospective, it feels worth noting that around about now was about the time that predictions from years ago were estimating that the early-war Russian advantages in various pre-war stockpiles and early-war industrial mobilization would be petering out. The technological adaptations of drones shaped how it would work out in practice, and the north korean armories selling their shells changed the fighting season math, but the general trajectory of Russia's military-industrial expansion facing diminishing returns as western economic mobilization caught up was projected years ago.
The two big developments of the last year and a half have been the manpower and American dynamics.
Manpower was supposed to be Russia's trump card, and many people- both sincere supports and concern-trolling- argued that Ukraine needed to make major politically costly decisions to expand intake and fill out the trench lines. The spoiling factor was that drones have gotten so ubiquitous and slow that fully-manned front lines have been liability compared to partially manned lines supported by drones. Worse, or better, this coincided/enabled/exploited the Russian discovery/adaptation of their manpower-intensive infiltration tactics. Massed offenses were less effective than sending infiltrators between lines and trying to build up forces behind a Ukrainian line. This was manpower intensive due to how many would get caught, but pushed the line on the map more.
The net result, though, has been that it diminished the criticality of the very-real Ukrainian manpower issues (which were more restricted on infantry than drone users), while pushing the Russian manpower issue into its weakest dynamic, the replacement costs. The all-volunteer contract model required and requires ever-increasing amounts of money, money the central government tried to push off onto the provinces which had their own limits. Well, economic challenges are real, and there are reports that Russia has been trying to put in the mechanics for various degrees of drafting to supplement numbers. Except a draft for Ukraine has been an incredibly sensitive issue for the Kremlin since the first mobilization sparked an exodus, which is why the nominal numeric superiority to overwhelm the Ukrainians has been far less overwhelming than anticipated. Manpower political costs is one of Putin's signature issues as a strategic procrastinator, and will continue to drastically limit Russia's ability to utilize it's nominal trump card.
Which leads to the industrial dynamics. Even if there was a conscription wave now, it would be less useful than it would have been a year or two ago, as a lot of the relevant cold war kit has already been mobilized.
Conscript waves in repurposed civilian vehicles and other makeshifts are not as useful as conscript waves might have been in reactivated soviet-era armor before there were as many or as good drones. As the war has progressed, a lot of the soviet inheritance of vehicle parks have been depleted, and those reactivations were what fueled the core of Russia's claims of massively expanded industrial capacity. Part of the proof that sanctions weren't working was that Russia was able to produce tanks regardless, but as the stock of refurbishable vehicle types closes, those reactivations aren't being replaced by 'new' system production. There are certainly many vehicles left to go, but per the logic of prioritizing reactivating your highest payoff systems first, it's diminishing returns.
Industrial news hasn't all been in Ukraine's favor, which is where the American issue comes in. The American Trump administration cut down aid to Ukraine, carrying out pre-existing deals but not seeking to expend political capital on major aid packages. Worse from a Ukrainian perspective, the Iran War has expended many of the air-defense assets they would have preferred to receive themselves, and even put them in a bidding war against the oil-rich gulf states for the foreign military sales that remain. Russia's constraints don't mean a Russian collapse.
But even this front has a few more-than-slightly silver linings for the Ukrainians. While the Americans stopped donating to Ukraine, this was because the Trump administration transitioned to selling to the Europeans who would donate to Ukraine. Rather than the total cut-off the pro-Russian thought leaders fantasized in, this has resulted in a far more stable 'floor' for American enablers to Ukraine, since Donald Trump likes making money and the aid-skeptic camp was split from the aid-opposition camp once it was no longer a matter of charity. Ukraine itself is getting in on this air defense spending surge as a major prospective exporter of license agreements and training, even as the Iranians are like the Americans going to be rebuilding their drone and missile inventories rather than selling as many to Russia for Ukraine.
And while the Europeans are paying the fiscal costs for transferring American arms to Ukraine, this has led to both rationalization of purchases ('what has best cost-benefit' rather than 'Americans, spend more') and coincided with the EUropean rearmament programs. Both the US and European states are well into efforts to expand their defense industrial basis, and while the current and near term means 'less free stuff for Ukraine,' it can expand the longer-term support chains. This is an area where Ukraine has some real value to trade, since it's own indigenous development programs offer it knowledge / capacity to trade for European and American support and investments elsewhere, making other forms of aid more politically palatable as 'trade' or 'investments' rather than 'charity.' Which itself has just gotten more resilient, as the Hungary election as seen Putin's primary proxy in EUropean politics fall, with Hungary no longer blocking the sort of financial aid packages that keep Ukriane afloat on a fiscal level.
Overall, where 2025 was a giant ambiguous ? that Russia was putting its hopes on for getting the US out of the Ukraine coalition, the last year and change have been both volatile but also measured in aggregate. American support has been curtailed, but remains significant and has probably established a reliable 'floor' which it ebb above depending on context and interest. Ukraine successfully navigated the changes in its political soft-power position in the US and in the 2025 ceasefire negotiations in a way that neither compelled it to give up defensive territory or saw the Trump administration blame it for the failure, both of which were Russian failures consistent with Putin's strategic procrastinator tendencies. And finally, Europe has more or less (willingly and unwillingly) shouldered many of the costs to continue support to Ukraine fiscally and with longer-term material support.
I wouldn't say it's a 'good' position to be in- major industrial war is never good- but Ukraine certainly seems in far more stable a position than it was a year ago.
Truly the second worst part of it was how mind-numbingly boring it could be. You can be a vatnik or a joo poster or whatever else all you want as long as you can mind your manners, but at least be an interesting about it. Interesting people can be interesting when invested in their hobby horses. They shouldn't make people's eyes glaze over predictable and predicted repetitions.
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