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You’ll be able to learn extra nice Ukraine protection by each employees and group members right here.
Speaker of the Home Mike Johnson has been working laborious to separate Ukrainian help from Israeli help, then including poison capsules to each in order that they will’t move. However simply because nothing is more likely to transfer out of the Home anytime quickly doesn’t imply that the pipeline is totally shut.
On Friday, the Biden administration introduced a $425 million package deal of help for Ukraine. Of that, $125 million got here from the present and dwindling “Presidential Drawdown Authority” ($5.4 billion remaining), whereas one other $300 million got here from the Ukraine Safety Help Initiative, which permits the U.S. to put army orders to business on Ukraine’s behalf. This spending exhausts all funds from that latter program.
The package deal consists of extra HIMARS, extra NASAMS, extra artillery rounds, and extra anti-tank weapons. As well as, it comes with numerous small-arms ammo, spare components, and a dozen transport vans. It’s actually not every part Ukraine may ask for, nevertheless it appears to mesh properly with the instant want for extra precision weaponry and artillery to fend off Russian assaults just like the one at Avdiivka. Plus, there’s yet one more merchandise that could possibly be attention-grabbing.
Tucked down on the backside of the U.S. help package deal is that this line:
This says “further” as a result of studies again within the spring indicated that Ukraine had been despatched Humvees from the U.S. carrying launchers geared up with the Superior Precision Kill Weapon Methods (APKWS). These methods aren’t truly laser weapons within the sense that they knock targets out of the air utilizing a beam of coherent mild. They’re simply utilizing lasers to color a goal that will get shortly taken down by a small missile.
Initially, these methods had been meant for plane and helicopters.
However as has already been demonstrated in Ukraine, they are often mounted on armored personnel carriers, infantry preventing automobiles, and even pickup vans. They may also be fitted to the four-shot VAMPIRE launcher, the place the primary two letters of that acronym stand for “Car-Agnostic.” So these might be fired from roughly something on which you’ll be able to clamp a bracket. That features a fastened location.
The vary is about 11 kilometers when fired from a aircraft, significantly shorter when launched from the bottom.
Mounting these items on one thing low-cost is greatest as a result of the large drawback with such weapons is that they are often noticed simply. Not solely do lasers do a very good job of pinpointing a goal, however in addition they give away the supply of the beam.
Nonetheless, this method, which is predicated on transformed Hydra 70 unguided rockets, has a few actual benefits. First, there are lots of them. Whereas individuals ponder the restricted variety of ATACMS and NASAMS which might be out there to ship to Ukraine, there are one thing like 50,000 APKWS missiles able to go. Additionally, at round $20,000-$25,000 every, they’re cheaper than the roughly $35,000 price of a Russian Lancet drone. Hitting one of many tiny, low-cost consumer-grade FPV or quadcopter drones now swarming the skies on either side is perhaps a problem, however nothing goes to be cost-effective towards these weapons besides digital warfare.
APKWS is exact, quick, and efficient. The tradeoff is they’re weak to counter-battery fireplace if—and this can be an enormous if—the enemy is supplied to detect them.
Low cost, high-precision weapons that may take out automobiles or drones and might be mounted on nearly something … by some means, it’s laborious to see this as unhealthy. They might not be long-range, however with the preventing that’s occurring now alongside the entrance line, they could fill an enormous want.
That record of kit misplaced on Friday is so lengthy largely due to a reputation we haven’t heard in a while: Vuhledar. Which … holy cow, it is getting actually laborious to inform one huge Russian catastrophe from one other.
Oooh, Russia’s willingness to maintain feeding males and machines into the crusher north and south of Donetsk is baffling. Success on this space would assist Russia to each shield its quisling capital at Donetsk and push Ukraine from defensive positions it’s held since 2014. It’s simply that, thus far not less than, Russia has not succeeded. It’s not succeeded to an infinite diploma.
At Bakhmut it was clear that halting Russian wave assaults was coming at a price of very important losses on the Ukrainian facet—sufficient so that individuals may have severe conversations about whether or not it was price it to carry Bakhmut, and a few armchair generals may, ahem, urge Ukraine to get out of there weeks earlier than the preventing ended.
However that doesn’t appear to be the case in Russia’s current makes an attempt to advance. Whether or not it’s the first sequence of Vuhledar assaults in the beginning of the 12 months throughout Russia’s deliberate “winter offensive,” repeated makes an attempt to retake Klishchiivka after Ukraine liberated that space, or the repeated failures at Avdiivka, or Vuhledar revisited, these Russian assaults have a vastly lopsided price. Not even the Russians are arguing that Ukraine is taking even a fraction of the losses Russia is seeing.
Each certainly one of these Russian assaults appears to contain trying to run columns of automobiles or infantry by means of open fields in areas the place Ukraine holds sturdy defensive positions and may direct concentrated artillery fireplace. The fields east of Klishchiivka, northwest of Avdiivka, and southeast of Vuhledar all look the identical … as a result of they’re all lined in smoking Russian wreckage and a ghastly array of Russian corpses.
Russia is clearly in search of a method that enables it to interrupt by means of Ukraine’s defensive positions in these areas, however simply as clearly, that method shouldn’t be in sight.
Russia’s Black Sea Fleet has turned from a weapon that Russia flexed to point out its power within the area into pricey, weak belongings it should shield towards Ukrainian assault.
Please do feed the drones.
Don’t say that massive media isn’t persevering with to cowl Ukraine. And sure, that is actual.
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