Another signal - a sparsely equipped army of a few thousand can march in from Ukraine and take Moscow in a matter of hours, facing minimal resistance. Regardless of the outcome I’m sure NATO has been taking detailed notes.
In other words: APCs on a highway are not that different from intercity buses, and highways are designed to let you cross the country quickly.
Highways let you move fast only as long as they're intact and no one is shooting at you; otherwise, they make you an easy target. Russian army experienced that first-hand in the first two months of their invasion of Ukraine.
my point was that they tried and they failed. wagner has a bunch of manpads and few pantsir sam systems. they tried to bomb them on highway from planes but missed and kill civilians in track. they also tried to shoot at them missles at voronezh but blew up some petrol refinary. they also tried to bomb some bridge to block road to moscow - but also missed
No, I believe the oil refinery got blown up by a Wagner surface to air missile. The Wagners were trying to shoot down a federal Ka-52, the helicopter successfully deployed countermeasures, and the missile flew off target into the backstop - which happened to be a refinery.
There are two videos of the event from different angles circulating on telegram, it's pretty clear.
It surely was considered. I can imagine in the state of panic even tactical nukes were considered, but sure, not reasonable.
But if Wagner forces would have actually pushed through, then they definitely would have blown up bridges, if the alternative would have been Moscow under siege or house to house fighting.
Edit: here's a link but this is not on the main highway. Unsure of the scale of this "operation" and if this was ordered from top brass or local initiative.
https://meduza.io/news/2023/06/24/v-lipetskoy-oblasti-gde-na...
And of course marching towards Moscow only staying hundrends of kilometers away from it (while being let to march), and "taking Moscow in a matter of hours" is a totally different thing.
i think you overestimate russian military might. russian military is second strongest military in russia those days
prior to this, last month, some RDK and Russian Legion performed ~10km deep incursions into russia, pretty much unopposed and stayed there for a days.
so no, it's not only onliners. it's just state of russian state. where everything is fake and for show
Reality is ground forces let wagner pass out of fear/solidarity. Only aviation tried, and failed hard to stop the convoy.
Especially if there's been reports it's seriously been considered in Ukraine.
NATO is not what it was before 1989, and will take decades to come back up to a minimally acceptable level.
And some things do take decades, even in perfect conditions. Building up a navy takes time due to the long construction timelines for ships. Developing coordination for combined arms operations requires both good officers and non-coms. These take time to develop as well, and need to be continually sustained.
If you focus efforts, it doesn’t take long at all.
And surely you understand that the US economy and state of industry in 1943 (when the Liberty ships were being launched daily) is quite different than today? Only one country currently has the shipbuilding capacity to even think of something like that. The US (and Europe) have closed down a huge number of shipyards since the end of the Cold War, and it would take decades to create new ones, with trained workforces. All the US shipyards are short workers in almost all categories.
This one statement means you don’t know what you’re talking about. Non commissioned officers are E4 rank, you can leave bootcamp at E3 rank. 6 months later get E4. NCO only requires experience at the E7 or above level, which don’t fight only lead.
The name Kriegsmarine, when used to describe the German Navy, has extremly strong WW2 connotations, on a similar level as "Wehrmacht". :)
NATO simply has neither the stockpiles nor the production capacity to enter this war.
Can you?
That's the amusing part. The sad part is that the people behind the troll farms still think they're fooling anybody in the West.