Russian lawmakers authorize Putin to use military force outside the country, Part II

[Labster]

I haven't updated this thread in a while, mainly because things were very depressing last year.  After the failure of Ukraine's Zaprorizhzhia offensive in the south, the war settled into a terrible stalemate.  Russia was slowly gaining ground through its willingness to sacrifice the lives of its minorities.  And then moved on to sacrificing the lives of volunteers from other countries (and orders for North Korea, who got money for lives).  On the other hand, Ukraine was having pretty severe manpower problems, with a huge fraction of a generation dead, wounded, or draft dodging.  Russia's winter campaign strategy was largely strategic bombing of power plants, meaning a cold winter indeed -- not that this strategy will ever be effective for destroying an opponent's will.  The U.S. has essentially abandoned foreign aid to Ukraine, though the E.U. has increased but not quite covered the gap.

Surprisingly, then, this year has turned out to be quite hopeful for the good guys.  Ukraine has managed to deploy entirely new killer robots -- not the kind from the movies, but more a long the lines of throwing a machine gun plus platform onto wheels and remote-control it in front of your troops.  And they've spent more resources developing drones, and targeting infrastructure far into Russia.  It turns out it's very hard/expensive to have effective air defense covering a country the size of Russia.

I watched a video on their drone tactics, which I can't really recommend because the guy wouldn't get to the damn point, but when he finally did, it's full of fun stuff like "three drones repeatedly switching places totally screws up Orkish radar tracking" and is all pretty sophisticated now.  The fact that Ukraine has managed to get defense treaties with gulf states, all ostensibly protected by the U.S. but apparently not in practice, shows the sophistication that Ukraine has gotten in drone design and in drone doctrine.  While Russia is still mostly isolated, Ukraine is making new allies, getting diplomatic wins that mean new investment in Ukraine.

The U.S. seemed like it was handing Russia a big win when You-Know-Who attacked Iran.  Pretty early, in order to keep petrol prices low, the US dropped sanctions on Russian fuel.  But it turns out high fuel prices haven't been much of a boon for Russia because of a couple things: rising fuel prices means the Russians need to spend more on subsidies for their own petrol prices.  And Ukraine has been targeting fuel production as its drone strategy, so the windfall profits have been largely eaten up on infrastructure repair.  Plus, Iran has stopped shipping its drones to Russia, using them in its own defense.  So far, the one and only clear winner of the US-Israel-Iran War is Ukraine, which is honestly just weird.

Russia unilaterally declared a ceasefire for its Victory Day parades tomorrow.  Ukraine unilaterally countered under the same terms of the Russia's ceasefire, except that it would start on May 5 instead.  Russia ignored Ukraine's actual ceasefire which they actually did... so I guess it's back to war as usual.  They're moving air defense away from the front lines to protect Moscow for the parade.  There are no tanks left to run through the streets, so they're just having a few guys march in formation.  Russia, you alright?

Ukraine's manpower problems are still present, but at least they've adapted around it.  They're retaking land in their country once again.  And the U.S. is too distracted to make things worse, at the very least.