I’ve heard the Russian economy is overheating and is going to have major problems by mid 2025 (interest rates already 20+% and home mortgage rate have hit a peak at 40%). I figured that would mean that the Russian war machine would start having massive problems by the end of 2025.

But the way Russia is pushing so hard, after a Trump victory and expected US support withdrawal and pressure to negotiate, makes me think they are trying to begin negotiation on Day 1 of a Trump presidency. Which I would infer means they are in a worse position than I expected and could have massive war machine problems by mid 2025.

If Ukraine was then able to, and did continue, fighting until the end of 2025, they may start making major gains in the war against the broken Russian war machine. Putin may call a second mobilization wave to slow the Ukrainians but that may be counterproductive by causing general unrest and protestation against the war.

Really seems like it has to be electronic interference. It happens everytime the drone gets close to the soldier.

On a potentially positive note, it seems that the Russians are running low on artillery systems (loss of ~25/day on a high casualty day compared to ~70/day months ago).

I believe euromaiden press estimates they have 21% of their total stock pile left and they field ~20% at a time. This would mean they have essentially no reserves left and field usage is now limited by production rates and refurbishment of equipment in bad shape.

It may be because they are running out of reserve Soviet equipment and are forced to rely on meat assaults to keep up the pressure.

I’ve noticed the number of artillery system destroyed per day is about half (~25-35/day) of what it was for most of the past year (~70/day).

Same with APCs, the number seems to have halved and the “vehicles and fuel tanks” number has risen to compensate. To me, that indicates the Russians are riding into battle on unarmed vehicles (motorcycles, golf carts, regular cars/trucks, etc.) and are more suseptible to becoming a casualty than earlier in the war.

If that were the case, the Russians pressure/assaults may not have increased as significantly as the casualty number increase would indicate.

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I suspect the storage facilities are close to being completed emptied of working or easily fixable pieces and all that’s left is scrap/spare part pieces.

They may be receiving, or could receive in the future, artillery pieces from allies (ex. NK) that could change their ability to keep up losses.

Regarding China, I don’t think China would militarily invade a stable Russia (not civil wared). I think it’s more likely they will economically dominate them, with the implicit threat of militarily/covert action if Russia tries and recover their economic sovereignty in those dominated regions.

This news site usually has a graph with the loss percentage of the initial total and how much of the initial total is active vs reserve.

https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/10/12/russo-ukrainian-war-day-962-north-korean-troops-train-in-russia-for-potential-ukraine-deployment/

To answer your question, the chart shows it to be ~6,120 total artillery systems left. At a loss of 50 a day (assuming they don’t tailor down their use as they lose availability [massive assumption]), they should completely run out in about 122 days / 4 months (~ February 2025).

Obviously, that is unlikely to happen and I expect that they will tailor down their use closer to their production rate (I don’t know what their production rate is) before the end of the year, as they completely run out of any reserves.

I think they probably ment to put special equipment’s “99” under vehicles and fuel tanks. Otherwise, they would have destroyed 3% of the total destroyed special equipment.

With ferries and heavy rail over the Kerch Strait Bridge unlikely, it seems Russia is left with the new rail line being built through lower Ukraine (don’t know if its finished yet) and/or trucks across the bridge (not sure the volume it can accommodate). Seems like Crimean logistics are going to be constrained in the short term.

My recollection is that the ruble is restricted (partially/mostly?) from being traded by the Russian government. So, most of the ruble currency exchange is on the black market, which wouldn’t be what Google finance shows.

I semi recall reading something a year or so ago about the black market ruble value being half of the publicized value, so maybe what she is referencing is a recent significant drop in the black market ruble value.

I’m pretty sure the 3rd pre-war bridge was taken out (yesterday?). So, all Russia has left is the pontoon bridges (2?) and possibly one was taken out earlier today (1 left?).

To me, it seems Ukraine is trying to trap troops and equipment below the river and get a large personnel surrenders and equipment recovery.

Relevant text:

Ukrainian crews say the fundamental problem is that the Abrams were built for advances aided by air power and artillery, which Ukraine lacks.

Russia, meanwhile, continues to make heavy use of drones in its attacks, which the Abrams struggle to defend against.

Relevant section of the article where it lays out what has been changing and what still needs to change:

… graft has been all but exterminated in some of the worst affected areas - for instance, government services such as issuing passports, permits and licences.

He also tells the BBC that significant progress had been made in reforming education and police.

Problem areas

Mr Kalmykov admits, however, that the government has been less successful in eradicating corruption in using natural resources (e.g. in mining and forestry), regulating monopolies and in large infrastructure projects.

“Progress has been slowest where big interests and big players meet,” he says.

According to him, “in the next five-ten years the government should focus on cleansing the judiciary, which will make the general system of public administration healthier”.

Relevant sections of the article:

The EU Council finalized the agreement earlier on May 21, which would provide Ukraine with between 2.5 billion and 3 billion euros ($2.7-3.26 billion) annually, with most of it allocated to Kyiv’s military needs.

The European Commission then announced later in the day that the “resources will be available to support Ukraine starting from July 2024, with bi-annual payments.”

The distribution will be reviewed on an annual basis.

Besides the additional Norway airplanes, this was new information to me:

The primary bottleneck to the Ukrainian Air Force’s fielding F-16s in quantity is not limited numbers of airframes but how many combat pilots and ground crew Kyiv can spare from the actual war, to train on transition to the F-16, Cavoli said.

According to Ukrainian mil-bloggers, the first six F-16s with pilots and ground crew will reach Ukraine in June or July. Earlier deadlines had predicted the arrival in April or May.

That’s a good point about disease and I think it could be a potential cause of the low genetic prevalence.

I don’t know about your roaming free option. I think if that were true, there would still be wild packs today or there would have been roving dog packs mentioned in historical text (possible but I don’t recall any mention of them). Alternatively, they would have inter-breed with European varieties and had a more significant impact on genetics, but that’s not seen.

While I agree that Europeans liked to remove/exterminate “uncivilized” things, that mostly applies to people. I suspect if the American dogs were significantly useful they would have made use of them.

This conversation allowed me to recall that the plains tribes utilized dogs as pack animals. Then once horses made their way onto the scene those tribes switched from dogs to horses for that role. I’m not sure what other “jobs” American dogs performed but I suspect if they were significantly utilized as pack animals they were probably breed for such and with that niche gone they may not have performed well in other “dog” tasks, compared to European varieties.

To conclude, for American dogs to be such a small percent of the current dog genome, I think, the European varieties had to significantly outlive their American counterparts. Whether because they were replaced by better performing European varieties/horses, because they died from European diseases, or a combination of those options.

After the arrival of Europeans, native American dogs almost completely disappeared, leaving a minimal genetic legacy in modern dog populations.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7116273/

I did not do a very deep dive but it looks like there were “domesticated” dogs in the Americans prior to Europeans, but they were almost completely replaced by their European counterparts. This leads me to believe the European versions were far superior for the intended usage. If the American version was indeed significantly inferior for their intended purposes, they may have been at or below the effectiveness/usefulness levels of semi-domesticated animals, like foxes.

Edit: The_Sasswagon brings up a good point about the effects of potential European diseases on American dogs.

Mods, perhaps a weekly post like this would be beneficial? Lowering the bar to entry with some available support and helping to keep converts.

The cost of one “Orlan-10” drone is estimated between $87,000 and $120,000, as reported by the UK’s Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies.

Source: https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/01/13/russian-drone-manufacturer-orlan-10-ramps-up-production-despite-sanctions-inform-napalm-reports/

Thought this was a cool part of the article:

The acoustic sensors gather uncharacteristic sounds from the environment before artificial intelligence is used to establish whether anomalies are incoming kamikaze drones or missiles.

Dr Thomas Withington, an expert in air defence at the Royal United Services Institute said: “It’s interesting that this technology is making a comeback because it was all the rage before the invention of the radar in the 1920s and 1930s

“History, in a sense, comes full circle, but with the adaptation of the technological age that we have today.”