Bei Konferenz in Riga erörtern Justizminister & Vertreter der Mitgliedsstaaten des Europarats Möglichkeiten, RU für Kriegsverbrechen in Ukraine zur Verantwortung zu ziehen.
Ukr Armee: Kommen im Süden täglich 50-200 Meter voran. Kämpfer des Abschnitts "Taurien" haben insgesamt seit Offensivbeginn über 255 Quadratkilometer Boden befreit.
“President Volodymyr #Zelensky has extended an invitation to Donald #Trump to visit Kyiv, with a specific condition attached.
Speaking with U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 News, Zelensky said that Trump would be warmly received in the capital under one stipulation: the former U.S. president must demonstrate his ability to bring an end to the war with Russia within 24 hours, as he once promised.” #Ukraine
Many people have switched from Twitter to Mastodon, but not everyone who followed me before on Twitter knows that I'm active here also. Will you help me increase my reach on Mastodon? Share this post, boost it or comment and let me know why you're following me. Maybe with some smart hashtags. Thank you! 👍 😊
On 20 Nov, 2 missiles hit a hospital in Selydove, #Ukraine. Although no MSF staff were harmed, several people in the hospital were injured and 3 people were killed.
This is the 2nd attack within a week on a hospital in Ukraine where MSF is present. #UkraineWar
#Ukraine wants to receive JASSM missiles for F-16s from the US to de-occupy Crimea, - Forbes
JASSM is a stealth cruise missile with a range of 370 km. It's on Kyiv's wish list as F-16s are not yet compatible with Storm Shadow/SCALP, unlike JASSM.
"JASSM-equipped F-16 fighter jets could be critical to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov's long-term plan to retake Crimea without a fight," Brynn Tannehill, an analyst at the California-based RAND Corporation, said in a statement."
The inevitable, dangerous X factor. 1/...🧵in part, via David Frum:
NYT reports that Elon #Musk personally thwarted a #Ukraine military operation he disapproved of.
At this point, Musk's interference to thwart Ukraine battle plans is not any kind of economic action. It is an assertion of a personal foreign policy, in defiance of the United States, whose citizenship he sought and to which he swore loyalty in 2002.
So, let's get this straight. Elon Musk decided he had the authority to cause a strategic Ukrainian military offensive operation to fail. An attack presumably coordinated with the US. And Elon Musk shut down communications once the operation was already in motion resulting in a Ukrainian defeat. Ukraine is now in the position that military actions are subject to Elon Musk’s approval. Let that sink in.
Good morning to readers; #Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.
I'm out of the hospital.
In today's issue: I talk about my experience in the #Ukraine public hospital system, and
Joseph Roche takes us to the front to report on how hungry soldiers feed themselves.
In a wooded area, after a fleeting summer rain, a group of soldiers are gathered around a makeshift table.
"Pass me a plate!" shouts one of the soldiers before serving himself a large piece of chicken. "It's a day to celebrate."
Knowing US MAGA Republicans, Donald Trump, and House Speaker Mike Johnson have procedurally blocked all US military aid to Ukraine, Putin is depleting Ukrainian Air defenses by overwhelming it with missiles; 110+ Russian rockets last night alone across Ukraine!
Putin and the Republicans will leave the Ukrainians defenseless against the Russian barbaric onslaught!
After we had a very interesting discussion with @AdeptVeritatis on modeling the #Russia#Ukraine war from economic perspective, I declare to write about the model by Peter Turchin.
Turchin is a scientist working in the area of complex systems, which in the past gained some publicity as “chaos theory” - modeling systems so complex internally that their states are usually only described in statistical terms and their behaviour is described as “chaotical”, even when it really isn’t. Such as societies, economies, political systems etc. In 2020 Turchin made some fame when people dug up his 2010 prediction that in a decade US may be hit by a wave of large civil unrests. He came to this conclusion based on modeling a combination of numerous economic and social factors which seemed to converge to a state usually resulting in unrest.^1
Turchin has been also attempting to model the war started by Russia and his team created a mathematical model that includes economic (military industry output) and demographic parameters (number of soldiers).^2 The model has evolved over the last two years but the latest version is probably best described, including its limitations, by this article^3. I was surprised to see people like MacGregor and Ritter quoted there, but Turchin seems to use them as the proponents of the most possibly cynical scenario for the purpose of modeling. But if you read the whole model description, which I encourage everyone to do, Turchin’s assumptions are quite impartial and as realistic as a simplified model can be.
The baseline scenario is quite pessimistic: to make the long story short, Russia has economy and population so large that it will simply not deplete before Ukraine’s does. That’s as cynical as it can be, and as a matter of fact this is the core argument Russians are always raising: they’re just too big to lose and therefore they always win.
However, Turchin also looks at alternative scenario where Ukraine’s economy (represented by ammunition production rate) is really equivalent to the whole EU and US, in which case the roles reverse.
The model in theory should not be interpreted as a real-world forecast, as clearly stated in the article’s disclaimer. But you really can’t not do it, because all the time it refers to actual numbers of actual people.
The primary issue I have with it is the inconsistency of the predicted human losses with reality: Ukraine’s losses after two years reach almost 300’000 while Russian are 3x less. This, if anything, is the opposite of real estimates.
The secret really lies in two factors: the number of shells fired (function of economy) and the “casualties per shot”, which is kind of arbitrary and set to 1/30. The number is, again, kind of estimated based on real Russian loses, but then, on page 8, there’s a key phrase “I set d2 = d1”. This try statement essentially assumes that Russian losses per shell are the same as Ukrainian.
If you try to play with these parameters in the live model^2 you can actually get losses modelled closer to the real estimates. Of course, this model’s deficiency is prominently mentioned by Turchin in the article. The primary Turchin’s conclusion from the model’s outputs seems to be that the critical condition for Ukraine’s victory is economical and industrial support of its allies. Which was only days ago sadly demonstrated by evacuation of Avdiivka.
I would add that the losses ratio is also a critical parameter, because while Russia may have population 4x larger than Ukraine, losses at ratio 1:13 (confirmed armour losses) or 1:7 (declared by Ukraine) aren’t sustainable even for Russia. Which clearly hints that any strategy that incurs such losses at Russia is preferable, which most likely implies a defensive strategy.
Also, in terms of model’s parameters, as Turchin himself notes, human losses suffer from very high uncertainty as both sides actively obscure them. At the same time, OSINT provides equipment losses which were in the past confirmed to cover up to 80% the actual losses, which could make the case for further improvement of the model’s output.
Elon Musk secretly used control of his Starlink network to cripple a Ukrainian military operation while it was under way, in defiance of American foreign policy.
He is an oligarch working against U.S. interests, benefitting his fellow oligarchs in Russia. His biographer seems to think this is just Musk being Musk, quirky and idiosyncratic.
Does no one in the U.S. government have anything to say about one rogue private citizen knee-capping a war effort on which we have so far spent $75 billion?