I find it hard to believe that they will be receiving anyone larger than a glorified PT boat. Certainly nothing larger than a frigate.

Of which there are plenty of that class up and down the Danube.

There are other ways into the Black Sea…

Edit: rather than just downvoting, why not consider that the Danube exists and is plenty of patrol boats/frigates based up and down it by Ukraine friendly nations.

Have you been paying attention in the past 5 years?

Awww how sad.

Whilst the arrival of F16 and Grippen will help, it isn’t going to be some magic bullet wonder system that will win the war for Ukraine.

They have been rocking HIMARS for about a year at this point, Lepoards, Challenger2, Bradley, Patriot, Gepard, Excalibur etc from their allies. Not to mention the home grown/home developed systems that have achieved parity and even arguably surpassed the Russian Naval impact from the Black Sea. And yet they’re still at the point where they’re pretty much at an attritional grind. Russia has done well to adapt to much of these systems and tactics, using the last winter as an example of where they shifted focus from trying to gain ground to simply holding what they have (a-la Germany following the strategic failure of Op Michael).

I will steadfastly support Ukraine and strongly believe that Russia absolutely needs to be stopped and shown that their Imperial actions cannot be allowed. But we also need to be realistic and realise this isn’t as easy as we want it to be. That Russia aren’t the complete drooling fools that we want to believe them to be.

The autumn in Ukraine this year has been unusually dry from the reports that I’ve heard, so it depends entirely on whether that continues through to and throughout the winter.

This is something that I’ve been thinking about and came to the realisation of the last couple of months.

And this is exactly what Russia’s objective was after the disaster of last year. Politically and strategically is the best they can hope for. Drag it out and Ukraine’s allies and the world will get tired and stop caring. They’ll stop supplying weapons, and sanctions will soften, maybe even start leaning towards supporting or feeling sorry for Russia. Something that were already seeing with Slovakia cutting all aid to Ukraine and taking a ‘war is bad, negotiate peace’ stance that is a blatant and thinly veiled Russian supportive line. Which is funny since their new govt is Russia leaning.

US are also starting to waver recently with the whole House Speaker débâcle. And Poland/Ukraine relations are a little frosty at the minute too.

That’s before you even talk about the Russian strikes on the Ukrainian/Romanian border that are being almost ignored in relation to their severity. Or the Russian mining of the Black Sea. Or Russian missiles flying paths over Maldova on their way to Ukraine. It’s a piss take. And only a matter of time unless the world pulls its finger out.

It isn’t mutually exclusive.

Israel has been terrorising Palestinians and HAMAS has also be terrorising Israelis.

What are you talking about?

Both can be true. That Israel has been terrorising Palestinians, and that HAMAS is terrorising Israel.

It’s okay. I’ll take that x7.

Not because I like them, or even see the point with SUVs.

But it’ll be nice to sit in the oppulence for a couple of minutes before I sell it.

Pfft. Sounds like free cars to me.

Would have been nice if they had left the keys…I think I would have considered it if I knew I wasn’t coming back. But those all look like they were driven by the rich.

Hopefully the local authority do something interesting with them when they get ownership. Donating Ukraine for example. I’d imagine that even if they are too difficult to get keys for they, the more common/utilitarian vehicles can break for important spares.

That said, I’m sure then cars pictured are likely indicative of the whole range that has been left, so probably not.

If my airforce was comprised in bulk of early to mid era cold war museum pieces with a (very) small handful of late cold war era jets as my flagship units then I would be impressed with anything developed after 1991 as well.

I mean, that’s fair enough in itself. There’s plenty of nations out there still rocking their Falcons, Flankers, Frogfoots, Frogger, Tornados, Mirages etc etc completely respectedly. But they also allow their pilots more stick time in half a year than the vast majority of NK’s pilots get in half a decade.

This didn’t happen before their sons, brothers, fathers, friends, boyfriends and husbands starting coming back missing body parts, with PTSD, dead or not even at all.

Then suddenly explosives started falling out the sky on your doorstep after the above started happening and Ukrainian flags started randomly popping up places.

I know it won’t convince all, propaganda is strong with the uneducated and those the regime directly made. But there are plenty who aren’t thick or have any particular loyalty to Putin.

Honest at this point I wouldn’t even blink if Prigozhin popped up in the future to tell us they faked their deaths.

To be clear, I believe that he’s dead (and that it was probably an assassination by Putin), but so many other outrageous things have happened already little surprises me.

Same could have been said for their day trip. And that saw several helicopters and a couple of fixed wing aircraft getting knocked out the sky.

Just to move away from the article, I want to make a comment about the car itself.

Over the 2010s, the SUVs were really at the point where they all looked like totally generic boring blobs. Just an shape. Souless and dull. All the same. You’d really struggle to pick a stand out one out of a line up of Vauxhall, Citroen, Ford, Kia, Hyundai, VW etc. There of course was some brands like Porsche, BMW and Audi which were different, but they were genuine evolutions of an already pretty timeless and classic look.

Then Ford and Hyundai came to the table with some absolutely great striking and honestly futuristic designs to kick off their EV range a couple of years ago with the 2020 F-series and Tucsons respectively and by extension the IONIQ ranges. Not to mention the absolute beauty of the Rivian.

And now everyone is doing the same. Rather than look to find an individual and unique design language, everyone copies the pioneer (most times). With the rare exception of the marques who have the confidence to go their own way (a-la BMW, Porsche, Volvo).

Anyway, there’s my totally off topic 2p on the matter.

Yes. I am a user of Strava. But many aren’t, so rather than get bogged down in an explanation of the semantics, I wrote what I wrote.

Since functionally it is identical and any difference irrelevant.

Wait until you hear that Budanov liked his Strava post.

You can hope, but try and convince the guy in my discord who never fails to bring up Ukrainian war crimes and is outraged that more cluster munitions should be supplied to them.

But he’s totally not a Russian sympathiser, bro. Sorry, need to vent somewhere about his stupid takes. They’re flat out impossible to discuss anything with if you have a different perspective or opinion.