The Peanut Gallery: Russian Aviation Disappears From Eastern Ukraine - Fifteen Lost Jets Due Mainly to Incompetence, Kremlin Claims
March 3, 2024
Welcome to the Peanut Gallery! Today we’re going to talk about airplanes.
Please remember that I know nothing.
Recent relatively high Russian aviation losses appear to be prompting a significant decrease in Russian aviation activity in eastern Ukraine, although it is unclear how long this decrease in activity will last.
Fuckin’ cut-paste and slather that thing on the forehead of every mother fucker who says Ukraine can’t win. Scrape it into their scalp. Really dig deep to bring out the red lettering.
How big is this? Potentially huge. ISW undersells it a bit, burying it three or four bullet points deep, but that’s only because it’s still too early to draw conclusions. A week-or-so of drastically reduced RF aviation activity in eastern Ukraine and the lack of a replacement A-50 over the Sea of Azov doesn’t mean the Kremlin’s aviation is out for the count. It’s likely in a period of serious reassessment.
But without that A-50 running recon Russian Sukhois are having to fly closer to the line to drop off their payload. It’s putting them right smack-dab in the crosshairs of...whatever Ukraine is using to shoot them down. I don't think there's a work around this time. It's either fly and lose even more highly trained pilots (recall how long it's taking for Ukraine to train on the F-16), or restrict operations to Russian airspace. Either way the Russian air force is well on its way to joining the remains of the BSF in strategic irrelevance.
The thing is, though, without glide bombs enabling Russian assaults, their progress has slowed to a crawl. It almost seems as if Russia’s whole Avdiivka debacle is about to come to an ignominious end, piles of corpses swept and buried as discretely as possible to make way for the cameras. But before we pop the cork to commemorate this clown show, I think we should take a quick gander over at the score card.
In the time it took Moscow to seize Avdiivka Ukraine,
Secured a toehold in Krynky.
Destroyed several Russian naval assets.
Crippled Moscow’s ability to export refined crude.
Dismantled the Russian air force.
More-or-less established and enforced a no-fly zone over half of Ukraine.
And that’s without America’s help. Imagine what Ukraine will be able to do once they get their hands on a few F-16s and enough artillery shells. They’ll work fuckin’ miracles.
Russian forces operating around Avdiivka appear to be adapting to conducting offensive ground operations with trained and untrained personnel.
Russia seems to have developed a bit of a filtering process for conscripts: they send wave-after-wave of chafe, probe with veterans, then truck in another wave of chafe.
And that’s a problem because what I just described isn’t an army, rather a collection of prison gangs. It’s an organization approach with two interesting benefits:
Simple and natural (after all, it’s just basic tribalism).
Self-trains as any who survive an assault or two can join up with a gang of veterans.
And one incredibly important drawback: the Russian army’s organizational structure is almost entirely ad-hoc.
That last one is kind of important as it annihilates any attempt at systematization and collective action. Yes, tribalism is resilient—it's defined by external threats—but it also sucks at getting shit done.
China and Turkey continue to pursue their own negotiation platforms for a settlement in Ukraine, which the Kremlin is exploiting to further its own information operations aimed at discouraging continued international support for Ukraine.
Both China and Turkey want Putin’s war to come to an end. Erdogan wants trade to resume through the Bosphoros so he can collect his cut. Xi is sick of Putin antagonizing the West into rearming prior to his big push to take Taiwan. Together their efforts present Putin’s best chance at making it out of this clusterfuck alive.
Unfortunately Putin is batshit. We know this because he invaded Ukraine in the first place.
The Russian Anti-Terrorism Committee (NAK) announced on March 3 that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) conducted a localized counter-terrorism operation in Karabulak, Republic of Ingushetia.
I heard rumors that this was a full-on firefight, which is interesting because Karabulak is just off the border of Georgia and right next to Chechnya. The region is a real hotbed and will likely be among the first which peel away (if any do) from the Russian Federation.
Naturally we know jack-and-shit about this “counter-terrorism operation” by the FSB, but we can at least take it as a sign of Russia’s degrading domestic security situation.
Russian authorities in Moscow Oblast created “training programs” for people potentially considering adopting illegally deported Ukrainian children in Russia.[80] The program reportedly falsely conflates Ukrainian and Russian culture. The program reportedly tells participants that their main objective is to create a “second homeland” for Ukrainian children in Russia and that they will need to overcome “difficulties in international differences.” Participants of the training program must undergo interviews in which Russian authorities ask if they have Ukrainian friends and relatives. ISW continues to assess that the forced deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children likely amounts to a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Please give Ukraine what they need to bring this war to an end.
‘Q’ for the Community:
Will Russian jets ever return to the skies above Ukraine?
Join the conversation of on /r/TheNuttySpectacle!