Jimmy_D

China in particular don't want to risk breaking sanctions and losing US trade. It's possible they're being circumvented to a certain extent, but if Chinese components were showing up regularly in exploded ordinance that's been fired at Ukraine, we'd know about it.

Not personally, no, and I've never claimed to have one. I'll always be immensely grateful to those who fight, and allow people like me to not have to. I have been doing a lot of reading/listening to many that do have a military background, for what it's worth, over the last few months, and I've always had an interest in military history.

China tech shares sink as U.S. export curbs raise chip sector hurdles | Reuters

In the past 2-3 weeks, Russia have lost territory that took them months to take. Any progress on the front line has been minimal to none for months. Putin has been forced to use a significant amount of domestic political capital to partially mobilise and reinforce the Russian army, with limited effect. The limited supply of precision missiles is self demonstrating by how rare events like today have been. Sanctions really have been having an effect, and that's not an assumption. Instead of using precision missiles to target Ukraine's military capability, they've used them to target highly visible targets, that don't help them in any significant military way, but that instead can be used for propoganda both domestically and internationally. That appears to be the only way they can claim any sort of success currently, hence it sends a message of weakness.

Among other limitations, sanctions mean they can't produce or obtain the microchips or materials for precision guided munitions. Missed Targets: the Struggles of Russia’s Missile Industry - CEPA They're not 'out' of missiles as such, but they can't get anywhere near sustaining heavy usage of them.

So I guess attacks like today, that Russia's been preparing for weeks for to scrape together the missiles to carry it out, they'll be a daily occurrence now eh?

The message they've sent is "We're too weak to take on military targets, so we're targeting defenceless civilians." Militarily these attacks do nothing for them. In fact the opposite, it's using up their limited supplies of precision missiles.

Yeah, that's not acceptable in any way. He's gone.

They already put the bridge out of action for a few days. That alone will cost Russia a lot on the southern front where logistics are already stretched to breaking point. On top of that there was a fuel tanker burning on top of that bridge for hours. That reinforced concrete there is severely weakened. They won’t be able to run full weight trains over it. That one attack was an enormous hit to everything Russia are trying to do militarily. Most plausible explanation for this is still long range rocket artillery. Ukraine can likely hit it again once Russia have wasted resources trying to repair it.

How are Russia so bad at this?

Congratulations, you’re officially more optimistic about the way things are going for Russia than Russian State TV

Interesting, Russian State TV actually acknowledging that it’s Ukraine, backed by NATO weapons and training, rather than NATO themselves in this one. Wonder if that’s a deliberate change or if the host will want to avoid high windows for a while.

Blimey. Really felt like we went into this one with no confidence at all. At least we're the first team in months to keep Haaland down to one goal, and we're having a better day than Putin? Loss wasn't unexpected, to say the least, but there's a fair bit of pressure on the next couple of games now. Hopefully we can find some of the aggression we had between the Leeds and the Chelsea games.

There's one frame at 13 seconds on that video that seems to suggest against the truck bomb theory. The camera clearly being affected by the attack before any indication that anything has happened to any vehicles.

Still incredibly early, still unknown, but from what I've been listening to, extremely unlikely to be Ukrainian SF from below, which would have targeted the pillars. Russian media have switched from an initial claim of a train fire that caused no damage to blaming some sort of truck bomb, which could be possible, but would be unlikely to cause damage to multiple deck sections of the bridge AND the railway section of the bridge. Their official story at the moment is basically saying that Russian security checkpoints have been utterly incompetent and let Russia's biggest logistics link be destroyed. Some sort of missile attack seems the most plausible at the moment, but there doesn't seem to be any one explanation that fits all the evidence available at the moment. Some footage apparently starting to emerge now as well. Whatever it was, it was a hefty explosion.

Blimey. Kerch bridge hit and entire sections collapsed/damaged, both the rail and road sides. That'll be Russian logistics to the southern front severely hit, as well as isolating Crimea.

Eh? How often do women’s friendly matches get 75k+ attendances!?

That's a hell of a win ahead of the World Cup! Wiegman's unbeaten record as England manager continues with a win against the current World Champions. Both teams missing a couple of their best players, not to mention a couple of VAR calls just going our way, but we'll go on with the belief we can beat absolutely anyone. Could have gone either way but these must be the best two teams in the world at the moment. Our calmness at playing out through the press was particularly impressive, and our pace on the break constantly caused them problems.

Yeah, Ukraine have been busy in Kherson Oblast, to say the least. It’s starting to filter through even to State TV as well, how badly it’s going for Russia, albeit with the ‘spin’ that it’s all of NATO combined that Russia are losing to.

“Sorry Ukraine, I know you’ve spent months gutting Russia’s forces to the point that they’re running for their lives, and have taken advantage of that to liberate territory three times the size of Belgium in the space of a few days, but you have to stop now because you’ve taken too long. If you were going to stop them you would have by now.”

I take it you haven’t been paying attention to what’s happened the past couple of weeks then?

Believe the Starlink capacity Ukraine are using was bought by the US government for one of the military aid packages to Ukraine. In any case it’s available to Ukraine and is not available to Russia.

A poll on Twitter is the result of him thinking of something and having instant access to a way to broadcast it. It was ill thought out, and won’t go down well, but on the other hand Starlink has been a massive asset for Ukraine.

So, if Russia have destroyed so many HIMARS, where’s the verified evidence that Russia would no doubt be parading all over State TV to show that they’re nothing to be afraid of? What’s the capability of Ukraine’s, that’s apparently not HIMARS, that’s allowing them still to continually hit numerous targets that require HIMARS accuracy and range to hit every day?

Congratulations, you grasped enough straws to make an entire straw-man argument.