That’s kind of the point of the article, I guess. What is a museum piece doing on the battlefield?

The Leopard 2 was designed in the 70s. So for battlefield vehicle designs, that is not necessarily outdated. Most fighter aircraft in use today were desgigned in the 70s: Su-27, MiG-29, sure, we think they’re old, but the F-16, F-15, F/A-18 are roughly the same age.

Bloody bigots (if true). This is a desperate measure by Ukraine, from which the UAF actually refrained as long as the US supported them!

Now they don’t and they don’t.

So give them the means for a meaningful defense (and offensive) on their own land, and they won’t have to resort to strategic bombing. (Or droning, or cruise-missiling, or whatever it’s called.)

I know these are different parts of the government, but still.

Don’t think Mike Johnson wants to help Ukraine though. This is just him stalling for time.

Yes, I think this is exactly what it is.

I really can’t say. But I definitely think that the latest efforts by Johnson serve the explicit purpose of making the Discharge Petition less likely to succeed.

It’s a trap. If the House changes the bill, it has to pass through the Senate again, which is not guaranteed. This talk is intended to distract from the Discharge Petition that was initiated by a Democrat to approve the Senate’s bill. The hardliner Republicans, first and foremost Mike Johnson, have made it crystal clear through their actions that they have no intentions of helping Ukraine. The Democrats built golden bridges by agreeing to border security measures which many of them find abhorrent, and by agreeing to combine it with help for Israel, which some Democrats also don’t like at the moment. And still Johnson flatly refused to even consider it.

Speaker Johnson says the right things (“No one wants Vladimir Putin to prevail. I’m of the opinion that he wouldn’t stop at Ukraine … and go all through the way through Europe. There is a right and wrong there, a good versus evil in my view and Ukraine is the victim here”), but his actions speak louder with a very different message.

That’s just drawing from a special Presidential fund. I forgot the name. It is only a couple of billions in total, and must last for a year and for everything the administration wants to support without Congressional approval.

And if the $60 billion main aid package is intended for a year, then $300 million is the equivalent of less than 2 day’s worth.

“A drop on a hot stone”, as we say in Germany.

They did. What the UK, the US and Russia(!) should do in case Ukraine is attacked, is to “seek immediate UN Security Council action” to provide assistance. Which the UK and the US did. Of course, that didn’t achieve anything because of the veto powers of the permanent UN Security council member Russia.

The US and the UK were signatories to the Budapest Memorandum (all three memoranda, actually, there are similar ones with Belarus and Kazakhstan), but it was never intended as a mutual assistance treaty in the way the North Atlantic Treaty (the “NAT” part of “NATO”) is. It was just an agreement to respect each other’s territorial integrity and not to use weapons against each other. It literally says:

The Russian Federation, […] reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

The cop-out clause, of course, was “except in self-defence”, which is what Russia implicitly claims, when saying that its citizens in Donbas, and thus Russia itself, were under attack by Ukraine. Playing the victim has always been the preferred way to justify a war of aggression.

The part about giving up the nuclear weapons is implicit in the preamble which welcomes Ukraine to the non-proliferation treaty as a non-nuclear-weapon state.

The whole Memorandum is also really short, literally fits on a single page: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances

Ukraine never had effective control of the nuclear warheads, although they had physical control and probably could have made them unusable, but not fire them without some serious reverse-engineering and possibly rebuilding large parts.

Yes, and that was codified by all signatories of the Budapest Memorandum. Russia tries to argue that it hasn’t violated the terms because it only uses weapons against another signatory state “in self-defense”, which is an agreed exception. Everyone knows it’s ludicrous, but apparently even Russia does not want to be perceived as violating agreements.

The very concept of “NATO expands” is misleading. NATO doesn’t decide to expand. Countries that had previously been neutral apply for membership. Contrast that to how “Russkiy Mir” expands.

Must have been someone smoking at work again, igniting that volatile molten steel.

Thanks. I’m not too good with Cyrillic letters.

Tragic, if true, but you need to work on your texts and captions. HIMARS is rocket artillery, not an “anti-aircraft missile defense system”: High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System. And what is the caption in the video? PC30? BCY?

Saying it hasn’t been built in 30 years is a bit misleading. Although the base Il-76 airframes may be that old, the latest substantial avionics upgrade (designated A-50U) is less than 15 years old or so (first delivery in 2011), which isn’t too bad for military and aircraft systems. A lot of the E-3 equipment is older. That is not to say it is more capable than the E-3, it probably isn’t, but I’d say a fully functioning A-50U should not be underestimated. It’s even got toilets! Then again, it is also not clear to me that any “U” models are currently airworthy.

Also, for some comedic relief, there is a “Combat Approved” episode about the A-50. “Combat approved” is a youtube channel making unbelievably (though unintentionally) funny parodies of documentaries. Everything Russian is the absolute best, the old Russian stuff is decades ahead of anything the west is currently developing, etc. The impressive thing that they can say all this with a straight face. They have lots more of these hilarious episodes, plus dozens of short clips of aircraft landing and taking off, and some live-firing exercises.

I guess the question “why wouldn’t they just build the A-100 instead?” has about the same answer as “why don’t they just build thousands of T-14 tanks?”. They can’t. Partly perhaps because it needs Western electronics, which are difficult to obtain.

That aside, restarting production of a large and complex aeroplane is going to take years.

True, some will probably have survived, and some of those may even fly again (some percentage usually sustain disqualifying injuries during ejection). The A-50 crews probably had no way to bail out, though, regardless of where they were shot down.

This is in such stark contrast to Russian soldiers, who capture and disarm Ukrainian soldiers, who have surrendered, and then shoot them. Yes, not all Russian soldiers, probably a minority, but still, there are now several documented cases (and almost certainly many undocumented).