Icarus27k

It's getting weirder. The Wagner guy wanted to conspire with Ukraine.

Russia tried to destroy US-made Patriot system in Ukraine, officials say Russia tried to destroy a US-made Patriot air defense system in Ukraine last week with a hypersonic missile, two US officials told CNN. The attack failed, and the Ukrainian military instead intercepted the missile using the Patriot system, the officials said, marking their first known successful Ukrainian use of the advanced air defense system only weeks after it arrived in country. The Ukrainian air defenders fired multiple missiles from the Patriot at different angles to intercept the Russian missile, demonstrating how quickly they have become adept at using the powerful system, one official said. https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/12/politics/russia-patriot-missiles-ukraine/index.html

Such emotion, such grit in the voiceover guy.

This is one of the least serious charges he is accused of.

My first experience with the the politics of Russia and the countries that Russia used to control was when I was a kid and I mistook a Belorussian person for a Russian person. He was not happy that I confused the two.

There are some reasons to believe the Ukrainian counteroffensive will disappoint. One is the much hyped combined arms manuevers that Ukrainian troops have been trained on have been "all but impossible" so far on the battlefield.

"I, George Santos, patent holder of the Dairy Queen Blizzard, plead not guilty, Your Honor."

You would think George Santos' Pulitzer Prize for Music after he composed Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts would earn him some trust points.

How can they charge a card-carrying member of the Avengers?

That was surprisingly poignant. What was the deal with that anyway. I don't want to feel while watching a Seth MacFarlane thing.

The NSC includes the president, vice president, the secretaries of Defense, State, Treasury, Justice, Energy and Homeland Security, the national security adviser, U.N. ambassador and chairman of the Joint Chiefs. If Biden, Lloyd Austin and Jake Sullivan agree with this "China gets Putin to negotiate" strategy, it'll probably be tried later this year.

West Looks at China’s Potential Role in Ending Ukraine War https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-and-allies-look-at-potential-china-role-in-ending-ukraine-war-2d6cbb4d Paywalled article, but use https://archive.ph/ to read it. Basically, it's portraying Western nations, including the U.S., and even Ukrainian President Zelensky as being not as opposed to peace negotiations as before. Wait to see what the Ukrainian counteroffensive accomplishes and then get China (the nation that Putin relies on) to push Russia into negotiating. I've been really skeptical of negotiations for like a year, and I'm a little surprised to now see so many names possibly endorsing the idea. My impression was that all Ukrainians oppose it, but Zelensky's apparently considering it. But it hinges on China getting Putin to do it. That might not be hard. China seems to really want it and Putin is now basically dependent on China. Also, it seems like a cynical exercise because everyone knows Putin will be lying and just be scheming to possibly re-arm and attack again in the future. The thinking is EVEN CONSIDERING THAT, it would still be worth it because Russia has been so degraded that it will take a long time for them to be an offensive threat again.

I think it's more a case of Russia trying to hype these weapons unjustifiably. They believe these are magic superweapons when they aren't. edit: I'm referring to so-called "hypersonic" missiles.

It'll probably be 5-10 years before Russia can conceivably threaten anyone with their land forces again. I hasten to add the Russian air force and navy, along with their strategic forces (i.e. nukes) are still formidable. But the bombing campaign of Ukrainian infrastructure, which was a failure, makes me think the air force has limited capabilities. I don't know if they can hit anything more complex than an electric substation. And what was up with them failing to ever obtain air superiority?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has pared back his goals in the war in Ukraine to focus only on maintaining territory he has already seized, according to a new U.S. intelligence community assessment. Moscow has also decided to focus on its goal of preventing Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), told lawmakers Thursday. “We assess that Putin probably has scaled back his immediate ambitions to consolidate control of the occupied territory in eastern and southern Ukraine and ensuring that Ukraine will never become a NATO ally,” Haines said. “He may be willing to claim at least a temporary victory based on roughly the territory he has occupied,” Haines added. It’s a stark analysis from the U.S. intelligence community that comes over one year into a war that has left Russian forces with hundreds of thousands of casualties and without significant territorial gains. Russian armed forces have failed to seize significant swaths of territory in the last several months in Ukraine, despite reported plans to seize more territory in Eastern Ukraine by March. In April alone, Russian forces gained less territory than during any of the three previous months while they transition to defensive rather than offensive operations, according to Haines. It’s not the first time that Putin has appeared to adjust his goals in Ukraine. When Russian troops tried and failed to seize Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, due to logistics and resupply issues last year, Russian forces shifted focus to eastern Ukraine. But the U.S. government’s assessment at the time was that Putin still had designs to take over the entirety of the country, as The Daily Beast reported. And yet, a negotiated settlement doesn’t appear to be an inevitability, Haines indicated. “Even as Putin may be scaling back his near-term ambitions, the prospect for Russian concessions to advance negotiations this year will be low unless domestic political vulnerabilities alter his thinking,” she said. U.S. officials have been noting in recent days that military battles alone might not bring about an end to the conflict, hinting at a settlement in some form, even as Ukrainian officials insist that they hope to push Russians out of all territory Moscow has seized since 2014. Ukrainian armed forces are preparing to launch a counteroffensive sometime in the spring or summer to push Russia out of territory in eastern Ukraine, according to U.S. intelligence. “I do think that the probability of either side achieving their political objectives through the sole use of military means…is going to be very difficult, very challenging,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Foreign Affairs recently. Secretary of State Tony Blinken encouraged negotiations for peace between Russia and Ukraine this week. “We’re open to any country engaging in responsible efforts to try to advance peace, and that begins with a couple of things. It begins, first of all, with the recognition… that what’s fundamentally at stake is the territorial integrity and sovereignty and independence of Ukraine, so any peace agreement has to have that as its foundation,” Blinken told Fox News in an interview.

Russia 'Very Unlikely' to Use Nuclear Weapons, US Intel Chief By Reuters May 4, 2023 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia is very unlikely to use its nuclear weapons, the top U.S. intelligence official said on Thursday, despite past saber-rattling from the Kremlin and the heavy casualties that eMoscow is enduring in its invasion of Ukraine. "It's very unlikely, is our current assessment," Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Nuclear tensions between Russia and the United States have increased since the start of the conflict with Ukraine with Putin repeatedly warning that Russia is ready to use its nuclear arsenal if necessary to defend its "territorial integrity." In February, Putin announced Russia was suspending its participation in the New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms pact with the United States, which limits the number of strategic warheads each side can deploy. Haines did not elaborate on the U.S. intelligence community assessment. U.S. officials for months have said they have not seen signs Russia was preparing to employ nuclear weapons but also cautioned that they were staying vigilant. Last month, a top U.S. diplomat publicly said the United States and its NATO allies needed to remain alert for signs Russian President Vladimir Putin could use a tactical nuclear weapon in a "managed" escalation of his war in Ukraine. Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Wendy Sherman pointed to Putin's March 25 announcement that Russia was preparing to station tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus "is his effort to use this threat in a managed way." Still, there have also been assurances of nuclear restraint from Moscow. Last week the Kremlin played down the idea that Russia might be preparing to carry out a nuclear weapons test, saying all nuclear states were abiding by a moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons.

So this is a fascinating subplot. Prigozhin is the leader of the Wagner group, a paramilitary organization that is controlled by the Russian government but is distinct from the military. He's an evil guy who runs an evil organization that commits grisly human rights abuses, but he's also one of the only Russians willing to openly criticize the Russian government. He has a special hatred for the Russian military commanders (again, shocking). It seems like a bizarre civil war among the Russians. I think Prigozhin is just begging to be killed by his own government because he's being such an inconvenience.

I am baffled by the recent news cycle about AI. People who think AI is an existential risk to the world are being reported on with surprising little skepticism. I think that's partly because of mainstream society's ignorance of the topic and partly because of our own existential angst. We just lived through a pandemic, balloons that had some people talking about extraterrestrials and a war with nuclear weapons in the background. So, of course, we have to talk about AI destroying us too.

I watched Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines' testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee today. The intelligence community seems pretty sure Putin has reduced his goals to 1. keeping control of the Ukrainian land it currently occupies and 2. keeping Ukraine from joining NATO. That's what he would consider a win now. Also, the new, post-Soviet army that Putin had been building since the 00s (the one he had confidence in because of operations in Georgia, Syria and Crimea) is destroyed, and he's fallen back on Soviet era styles of combat and even equipment. It will take Russia 5-10 years to reconstitute its army.