Ukraine ping
Widget: [Shoigu knows he cannot make good on this, or the staging areas for NATO equipment inside Ukraine would have been attacked shortly after it started arriving. The Russian leadership has to say something, so they bark louder than they bite.
Ukraine’s behind the front lines support is distributed so Russian satellite and other intelligence can’t easily find them. Russian targeting beyond the front is using google maps, that is why they launch Shahed-136s at apartments and civilian infrastructure. An example of how poor Russian intelligence is that it took Russia eighteen months to destroy one HIMARS. The US taxpayer got their money’s worth out of that launcher.
His threat is what the Russian leadership wants to happen in their made up reality, when they know can’t make it happen so easily. This is where Russian propaganda and flooding social media comes into play. The time a western tank explodes, Russia will claim they took out an entire storage base.]
Just how big was the WW2 effort to keep Russia standing? The US sent about 8% of 1941’s economic production to the UK and 3% to the Russians. Much of the UK’s intake was said to have been rerouted to the Russians. If we take that to mean just less than half, it’s possible both direct and indirect (through the UK) annual US aid to Russia came to 6% of 1941’s economic production. That annual number is twice 2023’s Pentagon budget. By comparison, Ukraine aid is 1/15 the 2023 Pentagon budget.
As an aside, it must be “interesting” to be a citizen in, say, Moscow, these days. The invasion of Ukraine was supposed to protect Russia from “Nazis”. And every day, the might of Russia is touted in a 5x or 10x way, as we see here from Shoigu and our own Russian tools. Yet successful Ukrainian attacks on Russian infrastructure are becoming a daily occurrence too.
Some “protection”...