And that’s exactly why Ukraine is kicking ass. Paying $20k or $30k for a single enemy casualty is a pretty good deal in warfare. But these drones aren’t going through some huge defense contractor, they’re being 3D printed and assembled from off-the-shelf parts. Basically a little army of logistics people building hobby drones out of consumer level equipment, just with an improvised explosive like a grenade or some similar impact explosive strapped to the bottom.
They aren’t even paying $20k for a casualty, they are paying $1-2k for a hobby drone and a grenade and many of them create multiple casualties.

The more expensive ones cost more, but those are the ones you see that are reusable and can drop several grenades in one flight. Those are more like $5k-$20k. Still an insane bargain even if each one only creates one casualty before it is destroyed.

It’s a good theory, but why were they shooting at civilian cars then?

I think your theory may make more sense than most (explains the abductions) but it still mostly seems nonsensical.

I think a broad look at Israel’s policies is long overdue in a few areas.
But this action virtually guarantees that won’t happen.

I only know some basics of the whole situation, but I really don’t get this attack. Israel is a modern Westernized nation and enjoys STRONG support, financial and military, from many/most other Western developed nations. They have modern weapons of just about all types.
Israel is accused of some awful shit and stealing peoples homes. From what I can see they’re probably guilty of this.

But I don’t understand how killing a bunch of civilians at a rave is going to overall help the cause. It seems to me like a. it’d give your better-armed adversary an excuse to smack you down once and for all, and b. a good way to make the rest of the world feel like they shouldn’t be stopped in doing so (and if anything, helped in their efforts).

So what is the goal? Is this just an expression of pent up anger? Because it seems a poor strategy to me.

Try HomeSeer. I ran it for years before switching to HA.

Ukraine successfully defends against Russia because the rest of the world sends them tons of weapons. And because the famous ‘second best army in the world’ turned out to be a paper tiger. Poland does not want the same thing to happen. They don’t want to have to get weapons after invasion, they want to have the weapons beforehand to hopefully prevent the invasion from ever happening.

You are also thinking logically, like look at our military and look at their military and figure out if we can beat them or not. Dictatorships don’t always work that way. If delivering bad news to the great leader has negative consequences, everybody’s going to come up with good news whether it’s real or not. ‘Oh yes great leader, of course great leader, yes our military is strong sir, we stand ready to crush them like a small insect and there is nothing they have that can possibly stand up to your glorious military sir.’. It works until Great Leader actually orders a fight, and then when said fight goes to shit some people accidentally shoot themselves twice in the back of the head before tripping and falling out an unlocked window in tragic freak accidents.

Point is, Russia has shown that logic is not feeding their decisions. So when faced with an illogical enemy, Poland wants to arm up to dissuade any attempts from being made and fight them off if they happen anyway.

Yup this is the answer. Without Putin keeping him in power Lukashenko won’t last long.
Also hilarious that we haven’t heard much from Belarus about the recent Russian Duma comment that ‘all neighbors are up for grabs, the ones that cooperate like Belarus will just be last’.
‘We’re gonna conquer you, just not today’ is the sort of thing that SHOULD be turning allies into enemies…

TL;DR that everyone seems to have missed:

Poland isn’t sending weapons to Ukraine because they are arming up themselves instead.

“We no longer transfer weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki

This is exactly it. Their young population is heavily overworked and underpaid. There is no work life balance, there is only showing dedication to the company. And for this you often aren’t even paid enough to move out of your parents house.

To put this in perspective- in Japanese offices there is a thing called hanko. It’s a small stamp that is unique to each person. Memos are often printed on paper, then circulated, then each worker stamps it with their hanko to indicate they’ve read it. This caused huge problems during COVID and many offices refused to close simply because the management didn’t want to try any sort of ‘digital hanko’.
The obvious answer to a Western culture is ‘that’s fucking stupid, replace that with any sort of e-document manager that tracks access and save a ton of time and paper and money’. But in Japan, the gray-haired manager gets respect and is not questioned so the hanko continues. The worker does not stand up and say ‘I demand more money and better working conditions’ because that is not how things work.

So of course the overworked, underpaid, 20something year old who is just scraping by has no time to go out and try to meet a partner, let alone start a family they won’t have time for.

As a nation, they will reap what they sow. The nation is turning gray and there will be nobody to care for them, or replace them. I think they will come out stronger- perhaps in 10-20 years when more of the older traditional people die, some of the younger folks can make serious changes. But for now they need radical reform if they want to avoid a very unhappy decade.

Interesting. And also concerning for Russia. As @DarkThoughts pointed out below, if they are pulling air defense from anywhere it suggests they are running out of equipment. Which is surprising, because air superiority is critical for them to maintain what they’ve taken in Ukraine let alone prevent strikes on their own territory.
I would think that whoever’s in charge of RU’s military would understand this and prioritize it, and/or could explain to Great Leader how important it is that no matter what else happens that UA not own the skies. If that’s not happening then either that guy’s a moron, or Putin isn’t listening, or the RU air force / military procurement system is in much worse shape than we thought.

If UA gets air superiority over their own held territory, and especially over contested territory, then the ‘special military operation’ might as well be over.

This is not good news for Russia.

The TB2 drone is slow and not stealthy. It’s relatively cheap compared to something like a Predator or Reaper, but still isn’t anywhere near disposable. It’s a sitting duck for any sort of serious air defense, and it’s most effective when air defenses are little or none.

If UA is succeeding in harming RU’s air defenses, that could signal a larger shift in the war. UA has had a very successful ‘dial for bullets’ campaign getting more and more modern munitions out of Western allies, and from what I’ve heard that is starting to include actual combat aircraft. If UA is dismantling RU’s air defenses, and if UA gets modern aircraft of their own, there’s a possibility that UA could end up claiming air superiority over much of their territory. And THAT is a game changer.

It seems unlikely on the face of it, as RU has a great many modern aircraft and pilots to match. But then again, since the start of the war, RU has gone from the 2nd best military in the world, to the 2nd best military in Ukraine, to (up until Prigozhin blinked) the 2nd best military in Russia. So maybe their reserves of functional combat aircraft are overstated.

Either way though, this is NOT good news for Russia.