And the Ukrainians have destroyed an untold number of Russian ammo dumps in the last weeks. Some of the explosions have been truly spectacular. This isn't something you can easily remedy. Any new ammo dump in range will be quickly spotted by either American spy satellites or local Ukrainian spies that are probably still active in Donbass - and get blasted to hell.
HIMARS is not enough to reconquer the lost territories, true. But it is enough to give Russians a forced operational pause.
This makes people angry, but does not significantly contribute to attrition of the Ukrainian military.
The recent cruise missile hits in Ukrainian cities haven't helped the Russians acquire even a square inch of new territory.
* It will only more cement Ukrainians against them
* It will have no negative influence on Ukrainian military nor aviation.
* Ukraine will use those attacks in their own propaganda to get more weapons and money from the West.
So those attacks are a waste of military assets with marginally negative gain. Who in Russian leadership is planning those dumb attacks?
We are too rational here on HN to try to emulate/parse/analyze the decision making involved. There is a big dollop of madness there.
The fact that the intelligence needed to give them valuable targets is a secondary concern. Their main concern is the readiness and cohesion that come from pressing the fire button.
In the case of this war at this very moment, it is long range high precision artillery. HIMARS eats rockets like crazy, it needs to be supplied constantly.
Once those supply chains are fully built and safe, they can talk about adding tanks to the mix.
Others are itching for a fight. I wonder if this is true:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/vzp17b/in_poland_a...
Poland is certainly one of the countries that would love to drive Putin to madness.
Do they still have them or have they used most of them up?
IIRC, for all the attention they get, the US has surprisingly few cruise missiles and would use up its stockpiles pretty quickly in a war like that in Ukraine.
But a lot of those missiles have been stored somewhere in Siberia for 40+ years. Their condition is probably less than stellar. Who would regularly inspect and maintain random ammo dumps located five timezones away from Moscow in the middle of nowhere?
I suspect that at least some of those missiles are outright out of commission and others are unstable enough to be a danger to the Russians themselves.
Also, see this anti-aircraft gun in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IwqmezeSuQ
From what I get, Western stuff delivered to the Ukrainians is in working order, while the Russians shells seem to have a fairly high percentage of duds - usually an indicator of a fuse degraded by long and inadequate storage.
And if shells frequently fail, so will other long stored equipment.
The US almost certainly does, but the Russians might not. They've been shown to have neglected routine maintenance in ways that caused very critical problems for their military (e.g. they lost a lot of expensive advanced vehicles, because their unmaintained knock-off tires disintegrated).
Both these videos are long, but they had a lot of interesting ideas and insight on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9i47sgi-V4 [specifically 33:10] (How Corruption Destroys Armies - Theft, Graft, and Russian failure in Ukraine)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJkmcNjh_bg (All Bling, no Basics - Why Ukraine has embarrassed the Russian Military)
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russia-now-firing-s-30...
Second, this explanation is much more logical than the version with russians firing superexpensive anti air weapons to random ground targets.
Third, there were photos of these missiles, and they belong to older series of rockets. Russia dismissed these old s-300 long ago, but Ukraine have plenty of them.
Europeans drag their feet on arming Ukraine and pressure it to surrender (“peace”).
The reason is gas and fear of refugee influx to Europe from hunger in Africa.
Plus Germans paying Russia billions for gas beats any arms supplies possible. And they will not stop doing it.
Very observably not. Russia seems to be actually incapable of buying any modern weapons for the billions of euros it receives from Germany. Even China considers such cooperation too risky.
The technical level of Russian equipment deployed in the battles in Ukraine has gone downhill since February. Now they are pulling really old stuff (designed or even manufactured in the 1950s-1960s) from storage. And some of their auxiliaries from the separatist republics literally use WWI and WWII small arms.
Money matters in war, but it cannot substitute for a missing/inadequate supply chain. You can't bury the enemy in an avalanche of euros, you actually need to procure the necessary equipment.
A year of slow territorial gains? Two? More? Not a problem as long as economy is propped by European money, Germans don’t bother sending enough weapons and Western media is tired of war and looks elsewhere.
Russia as a low prospect J-curve state might not be entertaining to the western media but it is basically the outcome the US has been gunning for since Gorbachev left, always with a lot of resistance from Germany. After a few more years of setting up alternative gas routes, I'm not sure Germany will even have a way to offer Russia yet another chance.