Ukraine wants permission from the west to use long-range Storm Shadow missiles to destroy targets deep inside Russia, believing this could force Moscow into negotiating an end to the fighting.
Senior figures in Kyiv have suggested that using the Anglo-French weapons in a “demonstration attack” will show the Kremlin that military sites near the capital itself could be vulnerable to direct strikes.
The thinking, according to a senior government official, is that Russia will consider negotiating only if it believes Ukraine had the ability “to threaten Moscow and St Petersburg”. This is a high-risk strategy, however, and does not so far have the support of the US.
Ukraine has been lobbying for months to be allowed to use Storm Shadow against targets inside Russia, but with little success. Nevertheless, as its army struggles on the eastern front, there is a growing belief that its best hope lies in counter-attack.
but this is still largely an excursion using older equipment and avoiding mass mobilization
I’m more inclined to think that that Russia is a paper tiger and the mass corruption in the country has fucked up any modern equipment they have to the point of unusability.
Seriously Striking Moscow (for example) would almost certainly result in a swift, all out retaliation from Russia towards Ukraine.
A large portion of the Russian military has been held in reserve for defense, on the grounds that a full NATO invasion could decapitate the regime (a la Iraq in 2003).
Lemmyites are convinced the Russian military is entirely exhausted and these suicide incursions represent territory Ukrainians can actually hold. But there’s much more of a long game at play, as Europe and Russia wage a proxy was of attrition across Central Europe, Central Africa, and the Middle East.
The only thing I’m convinced of is the fact that you’re talking like a Russian psy-ops agent. You may not be one but at minimum you’re doing their work for them.
you’re talking like a Russian psy-ops
I’m old enough to remember “Baghdad Bob” from the '03 Iraq invasion. We used to make fun of that shit, but now everyone talks like him.
Russian media insists they’re on the cusp of total victory. Ukrainian media insists the Russians are on the verge of collapse. And disagreeing with either one means you’re a spook.
Yeah, the whole “they’re not sending their best” Spiel was debunked in the first 6 months. The Russian equipment losses favored high end stuff at the beginning of the war and has been declining ever since. And the Russians have been activating older stuff ever since. Which is visible in the loss data.
A lot of conscripts are indeed not in the war, but judging by performance of the Kursk defense, there is reason to doubt the ability of these forces. Although quantity is a quality by its own right.
Eh, it’s been old equipment and concripts for a bit now, but that’s not what the sent at first.
Trying to take a country using your C team and old hardware and then scaling up if things go badly is a radically bad strategy. It’s a great way to lose your C team, and then send more competent soldiers to fight against a prepared and well defensed enemy.
That might be what Russia did, but if so it’s a show of incompetence about in line with everything else we’ve seen and not some “better slow down” signal.
Attributing loosing or making preposterous strategic mistakes to some sort of 5D chess is a weird choice to make.
I don’t know why so many of you people have such a hard time accepting that the popular conception of Russia as an Eastern counterpart to the US was inaccurate. Turns out that if you consistently invest less in your military equipment and personnel, you have a less capable military. It’s been 40 years since their expenditures have been comparable, and quite frankly it shows.
Using your old equipment for an invasion would actually be a pretty novel strategy. Ukraine consistently used the best equipment available to them. That that was leftover NATO hardware doesn’t mean Ukraine was choosing to hold the good stuff in reserve.
If they’re trying to use a “let the reservists die and then send in the competent soldiers” strategy, it doesn’t seem to be going very well. They’re somehow not holding the territory they took very well, and churning through a lot of what was presumably reserve hardware.
Failing to execute a gulf war 1, and so deciding to chill in a Vietnam situation for … Some reason … for an indeterminate period of time is just not a strategy that any sane strategist would pick.
If Russia has the ability to just handwave their way to victory if things got too rough, they’ve done a pretty terrible job of demonstrating it.
I honestly can’t comprehend what you might have seen of this whole affair that would make you think they had that ability, beyond clinging to the notion that a former superpower must still be a superpower.
They just don’t have the economy or the equipment to be able to afford to burn through endless waves of soldiers like you seem to think they’re intentionally doing.
They didn’t even get air superiority, which is just embarrassing.
Just a heads up, you betray your Russian supporting roots saying the Ukraine so openly. I’m assuming you accidentally typed it by habit, because most of the time you addressed them properly, but they aren’t just some regional dependant of Russia. They are an independent nation.
Russia is losing its troops and equipment. That’s why they aren’t using modern stuff anymore. You can find pictures of the modern stuff destroyed on the battlefield if you’re interested. They sent it in. They just got held back and their equipment was lost. It’s not a mystery. It’s publicly viewable to anyone curious.
They’re saving their best troops for if their initial assault fails defending the border defending Moscow city limits
Europe and the west are hesitant to provoke Russia for a reason. Idk why that’s such an unpopular opinion here.
Yeah, nuclear weapons and domestic political concerns around openly escalating a war as opposed to supplying a defensive war. No one is particularly hesitant to admit that Russia has nukes and or that that influences how NATO handles the situation.
People think that looking at the past decades of what’s happened to Russia, and the recent failures they’ve had and concluding that they’re just “holding back” is assinine.
Dude, Russia is not holding back it’s equipment. A lot of it is being tracked behind spotted on parade and such in Moscow and then blown up on the front. They didn’t even have optics for the vast majority of their troops despite the big advantage of the newer AK platform they adopted being that optics fit on them. You’d never see the US, for example, send that many troops to fight without optics, even assuming they’re holding back.
If Russia is holding equipment, they’re stupid. They should have just deployed it to the front and ended the war. They didn’t do this, and the reason is obvious: it doesn’t exist. They’re sending shit from the Cold War to the front because that’s what they’ve got. They aren’t some amazing superpower that’s just playing nice with poor little Ukraine. They want this war over desperately, so they would end it if they could.
