It says in his tweet what he claims. I.e. 18 months ago and about space.
But in response to Musk’s answer:
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I suppose what I am saying is that just because he is claiming they didn’t ‘speak’ doesn’t mean that other forms of communication didn’t occur.
Slightly late sorry. I haven’t seen that before. Interesting. Quite some blast to effectively cut the main spanning members apart like that.
I could understand the deck being lifted off its bearings etc. but what appears to have happened to my eyes is that the beams have failed and these have then dragged the deck off its bearings as it’s fallen. That’s why you’ve got a partial collapse two spans away. There’s probably an expansion joint there.
Still some questions I can’t answer at the moment on how they’ve managed to get the beams to fail like that. Leave it with me, I’m fascinated.
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Would there have possibly been some pre-work done? i.e. get a crew in there, or even a couple of people who know what they are doing, under cover of darkness, working underneath, to compromise the structure ahead of time. Then when there’s an explosion, it does more damage than the engineers might have expected?
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There is increasing speculation that Putin is slowly realizing that he is coming to a crossroads, where his military’s capacity to sustain operations collapses and he must either escalate or exit. The $500M tantrum achieved nothing expect demonstrating an impotent desire to escalate (I though Biden’s remarks last night were exactly the right tone to set). As Russian losses approach the 100k mark, that is a significant percentage of the trained combat forces that Russia had available. The balance have been pushed to exhaustion. Russian training has clearly been poor for a while, but depleted training cadres will have crippled their ability to make good those losses anytime soon. Ukrainian losses are undoubtedly significant, but Ukraine has been far more disciplined about rotating troops to rest and reorganize, and fully training units before they see any action.
The difficult questions are whether or not Ukraine can sustain sufficient offensive capacity to take advantage of the long pause Russia will undoubtedly need to take, and what Putin does if Ukraine does have that capacity and can push Russia deeper into crisis.
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Yep.
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There are signs that Ukraine has re-started offensive operations in Kherson since last night.
In Donetsk/Lugansk, we await the push for Svatove. I think Ukraine will capture it.
I also assume that the front lines will be frozen when winter sets in, so important for Ukraine to push hard now. Will be exciting to see what happens this month.
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I don’t think it’s very important, but worth noting. Russia has deployed strategic bombers to forward bases close to Norway. It’s their nuclear strike bombers. Probably either excercises or part of the escalation game
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I don’t think there is an estimate of Russian missile stores out there that suggests they could sustain that for two weeks, and Ukraine’s air defence is already better as a result.
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They can’t, which is why a lot of the fascists will be disappointed in the coming days. This was a burst, it won’t be sustained. Russia also doesn’t want to deplete it’s stocks completely, since the entire purpose of these weapons were to have them as stand off fires against NATO.
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I heard the Germans has given ukraine some anti-air batteries?
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I believe so, yes. The US has also sent some new systems.
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posting for the fun of it
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Straight from the factory (IRIS). Ukraine will be the first country in the world to operate these. Priority has been given to Ukraine over the Bundeswehr.
NASAMS should ship from Norway soon or have been shipped, also from the factory (this is payed by the US so is US mil aid). The systems are probably in the US I suspect, and will be shipped to Ukraine I think.
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Tiny personal anecdote. When I was in the army, I was in Force Protection in the Air Force for GBAD-NASAMS. On field excercises we deployed basically around the batteries and patrolled, had OP’s and more. The launchers themselves usually, when we were not in the field, were stationed outside my barracks. However, we were also supposed to protect the nearby military airfield and the fighter squadron stationed there, so we mostly trained in the woods around the airfield when not on exercises with the NASAMS-crews.
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Well, it seems the Germans wants to test out the IRIS-T SL in actual battlefield conditions. Hopefully, it works a damn treat.
That’s not the reason Ukraine is getting them before the Bundeswehr, but sure.
Good luck to them with that. At this point, Poland could launch an invasion and capture Moscow with relative ease. Russia has been hell bent on depleting its stocks of missiles and tanks in this war. They could not launch another missile, or send another tank over the border and they’d still be unable to find their arse with both hands if they got into it with NATO. Like I said before, if it weren’t for their nuclear arsenal they’d barely rank a blip and would have had their arses kicked long, hard and often.
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