The White House said Tuesday that the US is speeding up the shipment of an air defense system to Ukraine after Russia launched a major barrage of missile strikes on infrastructure across the country.
The US has pledged to give Ukraine eight National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS), but so far, none have been delivered. The NASAMS are being provided through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which allows the US government to purchase military equipment for Ukraine, but the process takes longer than sending arms directly from Pentagon stockpiles.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that two NASAMS should get to Ukraine soon. “We think that we’re on track to get those first two over there in the very near future,” he said. “We are certainly interested in expediting the delivery of NASAMS to Ukraine as soon as we can.”
President Biden spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday and promised that the US would be sending over advanced air defense systems. The US uses NASAMS to protect the airspace over the White House and the Pentagon.
NASAMS is a joint project between the Norway-based Kongsberg Defense & Aerospace and Raytheon, the former employer of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Before taking his post at the Pentagon, Austin served as a board member for Raytheon, which has benefited greatly from the US policy of arming Ukraine.
The Kremlin said Tuesday that by sending air defense systems, the US would prolong the conflict and inflict more pain on Ukraine.
Did none of these people see “Wag the Dog”? Made as satire — as something far-fetched. But revealed a great deal about the assortment of dogs at the NATO pound waiting “rescue”. Remember: NATO membership has more than doubled in the past couple of decades. Arf! arf!
And here Russia didn’t even want to give few of their S400 to Syria. Just goes to show the difference of keeping your friendly states strong.
I think in the future Russia will be supplying weapons to any one who wants to stand up to the US regime , if Russia had backed Saddam or Gadaffi NATO wouldn`t have had such an easy ride .
Yes they would. Short of sending nuclear weapons to Saddam, the results would have been the same.
What good would it do? Read about Operation Mole Cricket 19 to see what IAF did to Syrian air defense in the past. They can and would do it again.
I don’t think they wanted to give the US/Israelis a chance to see it in action. It seems that the F-35 can operate with the S300
That’s pretty obviously just what US “leaders” want to happen, just as they have wanted, since the collapse of the USSR, to corner, weaken and ideally balkanize the Russian Federation. And just as they have, with malice aforethought, continued and increased the provocations over the year leading up to the February invasion, even when it became clear that Russia was nearing the end of its rope.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to conclude, as some do here, that the US-NATO desires WWIII or a nuclear exchange. The reckless dummkopfs-in-charge aren’t actually that stupid. They absolutely are, however, plenty stupid enough to misjudge Russia’s reactions to the provocation and escalation — obviously. And they are more than sufficiently smug and arrogant to believe that they can avoid accidental escalation to thermonuclear hell.
They’re wrong, of course, but where is the opposition?
Edit: Disqus sucks. Really, it seriously sucks.
You’ve put your finger on it: The US/NATO/EU goal isn’t to take over Russia, it’s to weaken and balkanize the Russian empire.
That’s a dangerous game. If Putin looks weak and gets replaced, there’s a 99.9% chance he won’t be replaced by anyone who’s US/NATO/EU friendly, or as reasonable as Putin.
With several Russian satrapies starting to show signs of non-subservience, there’s a good chance that even once Putin or a successor declares “victory” and GTFO of (most of) Ukraine, holding the Russian empire’s periphery in thrall will occupy most of its time and resources … which means it will be even more dependent on emphasizing its nuclear deterrent to the west.
The day was always going to come when a bunch of regimes feeling like they have to wave their nuclear sabers would result in one of those regimes actually swinging said saber. That day feels very close at the moment, and the Russian regime is not the only one I’d put in the possible latter class. If Kim Jong Un feels truly threatened in any way, he’s likely to go for it. And the US regime seems just goddamn dumb enough lately to possibly think it could drum up an excuse and survive afterward.
I don’t see any reason to expect that Russian leaders will need or want to hold the periphery in thrall, but other than that . . . yeah.
The Russian imperialists have spent the last eight months unsuccessfully trying to bully one of their former colonies/satrapies back into thrall. Why wouldn’t they be interested in keeping the rest of the empire’s periphery in thrall rather than losing it too?
They didn`t bully they wanted to have talks , keep up FFS , it`s thinking like yours that causes wars
Can we agree they invaded another country?
It’s posts such as ^this one^ that lead some of us to think you are at least a bit Russophobic, Thomas.
Russia has been doing nothing of the sort. Rather, it is doing exactly what it announced it would do, for reasons that were clearly clearly laid out — for a very long time.
Russia believes that the invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing battles are necessary defensive moves in the face of existential threats. One need not agree with that view, but it should be easy for well-informed observers and analysts to understand that it is reasonable.
“Russia” neither believes nor does anything. The people who rule a fuzzy concept broadly defined (in different ways by different people) as “Russia” do things.
I’m not in the least bit Russophobic. I just recognize that the particular people ruling “Russia” are — like the people ruling “America” — strapped to the back of a fading/declining empire and doing what they can that they think will reverse, halt, or at least slow that decline.
If anything, I have a higher opinion of the Russian regime’s capacity for realism than I do of the American regime’s. American politicians seem to believe their own propaganda.
I like to cite the example of Soviet Georgia at times like this because there of the parallels. Putin drew a line in the sand. They crossed it. Putin took back Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and refrained of his own accord from efforts to reverse the Rose Revolution.
Ignoring how many centuries of Russian history?
No, John, understanding the current situation reasonably well and not suffering from festering Russophobia to the degree that dispassionate analysis is impossible.
Col. McGregor claims very reasonably that given the state of the art of weaponry nukes are obsolete, i.e., without any military value; and, were only useful as terror weapon (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) in bygone days.
There only use today is suicide. And so all the nuke talk is just terror rhetoric for the suckers (aka, us).
Why do we “suck”?
Are you with Disqus?
Let’s see . . . Disqus cannot consistently determine whether or not I am logged in. The comment system might keep me logged in as I move between the threads on multiple articles, and between site visits, or it might make me log in every time I move to a different article. Whether or not I’m routed through Captcha seems to be dependent on a cyberspace lottery drawing somewhere in this galaxy. Disqus is excepted from all the privacy-protecting measures that I think could possibly break it. This set of problems arises regardless of which Disqus cookies and site data re present, or not, in my browser.
Except when the comment text box is empty, at the beginning of composing a post, pasting text into the box explodes everything already there, as if the pasted text includes repeated <br> and <p> tags.
Whether or not particular formatting tags appear in the text input box has no apparent structure. When the <blockquote> tag, for instance, does not appear, it’s necessary to type the tags manually if a poster wants to use them. I suspect that a large percentage of posters doesn’t know which HTML tags to use or how to use them.
The behavior of the <blockquote>, <link> and template — <code> — tags is inconsistent. When applying the <blockquote> tag to selected text via the text box icon, for instance, Disqus may either (properly) bracket that text with the opening and closing tags or just insert both before the text.
On any of my desktop or laptop machines, following the “View Post” link from a notification email almost always takes me to this:
Those are the issues that come to mind immediately. It was the “insertion explosion” issue with the above post that led me, not for the first time, to accuse the comment system of being sucky.
It was a real pain to type this, displaying the tags using HTML entities. I haven’t written HTML documents manually for a long time. I hope this post give you an idea of some of the issues.
Ok, I see it’s the platform mechanics, not the users. Thanks for the response.
No, definitely not the users. Well, not most users. 😏
Putin should begin hitting ports / air ports and rail transport to stem the flow of weapons , air defence weapons should be hit first the plan is to create a no fly zone if Putin can`t see that he needs to wake up .
The smuggling of weapons just got a lot more dangerous after yesterday’s bombing of strategic rail facilities in Shepetivka and Pavlohrad. By destroying the means to deliver weapons and munitions to the front, the Russians may be sending the message that they are no longer willing to play “Whack a Mole”.