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.

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.

Yes exactly. And that’s why I don’t jump to the assumption that Zelenskyy himself is corrupt or he is covering for the corruption of others.
A dude that would tolerate corruption doesn’t say ‘I need ammunition not a ride’. He could have bailed at any point, still could. But he shows no signs of losing resolve.
If Zelenskyy is trying to keep inner circle corruption private to avoid public spectacle, I suspect that whoever is found guilty will probably end up wishing they were arrested publicly rather than dealing with the security service.

Most welcome :)

Absolutely!

I find in life it’s generally useful to not take things at face value, rather, ask what set of situations and motivations would make people say and do the things they are saying and doing? Asking that question a lot about a person and looking at a lot of their words and actions tells you an awful lot about a person, taking people you know at least something about and asking that about how they are acting tells you a lot more about that situation than you’d get at first glance.

So here we have Zelenskyy, a person elected on a platform of fighting corruption, and an anti-corruption unit whose official assigned mission is to find corruption and root it out and punish the corrupt. That SHOULD make them allies if not friends. And yet, Zelenskyy has just transferred the bulk of their mission away from them, to the security service. He’s also elevated the level of crime that corruption is classified as, and thus also the level of investigation and punishment it would carry.

So I ask, why would he do such a thing? Why would an anti-corruption President transfer anti-corruption activities away from the anti-corruption unit and to the security service? What is the motivation for this action?
And why does the anti-corruption unit respond with such a serious accusation (that the motivation is to cover up corruption of the inner circle)?

So let’s start with the first question- why did this change happen?
The most obvious answer to me is that Zelenskyy feels the anti-corruption unit is not doing their job well enough. Specifically, if corruption has infiltrated many levels of UA government, that he may feel the anti-corruption unit is itself corrupt, or that they are otherwise ineffective and are not finding enough corruption fast enough. So he gives the job to an agency that 1. has no history of dealing with corruption and thus potentially is less likely to itself be corrupt, and 2. has very sharp teeth as it is used to dealing with much worse things than domestic corruption. And he gives them the order to bite hard- by framing corrupt government officials as traitors and ordering them charged accordingly, the security service has a real mission that they will take seriously and assign good agents to.

And then, why does the anti-corruption unit speak out in this way?
Well they obviously don’t like losing stature, and perhaps they are just pissed off at potentially losing their jobs. So it could be plain old revenge- throw some accusations at the President who spat in their faces. But this feels a bit sharper than that. They didn’t just say this was a bad idea (‘why are you benching the most talented anti-corruption agents in such a critical time?’), they are throwing a specific accusation (‘this is only happening so corruption of the inner circle can avoid being publicized’). That’s a pretty strong accusation.

So I look at these questions, and ask what situation would cause both Zelenskyy’s action and the anti-corruption unit’s accusation in response? I come up with two possible answers.

1. The most likely one to me seems that the anti-corruption unit is either itself corrupt or is generally ineffective, and thus Zelenskyy is unhappy with them and that’s why they are losing the assignment. And so they fight back hard, probably because (if they are corrupt) they know the security service will find that out, so they want to at least muddy the water first and make the whole process seem politically-motivated and itself corrupt. That way when they are themselves accused of corruption, they can claim it’s for political reasons, not because they are actually corrupt.

2. The other possibility is that their accusation is valid- that this change IS intended to cover up inner circle corruption or deal with it more quietly. And that possibility has three sub-possibilities.
   2a. Choice A is that Zelenskyy is only acting on the advice of corrupt advisors, who are feeling heat from the anti-corruption unit and have persuaded Zelenskyy to transfer anti-corruption activities away from a unit that is hot on their tails. They feel they can better control the security service and direct them away from their own corruption, so they advise Zelenskyy to do this and he does it because he is focused on the war with Russia and mistakenly trusts those advisors who are themselves corrupt.
   2b. Choice B is that Zelenskyy has identified corruption within his inner circle and needs it dealt with strongly, quickly, and quietly- without creating a public situation that can be exploited by Russia or his political opponents (who may themselves have Russian influence). So he DOES want the security service to deal with Cabinet-level corruption quietly as is being accused, but that won’t result in the guilty being punished any less harshly.
   2c. Choice C is the least likely IMHO- that Zelenskyy himself is corrupt, or has decided to allow or tolerate a certain amount of corruption within his cabinet, perhaps from corrupt people who have proven themselves useful in some other way.

So of those 4 choice, choice 1 and choice 2b seem the most likely to me. And given that this anti-corruption unit has been working at their mission for years and there’s still tons of corruption in UA, that says to me they are probably not very good at their jobs. Thus, I advance Choice 1 as the most likely option.

Interesting.

Ukraine is known for thorough corruption at many levels of government. Zelenskyy first got elected for that reason- he was originally an actor who starred in a movie about a politician who decided to end corruption. He then ran for office on that platform and won. But when the system is thoroughly corrupt through and through, fixing it is not an overnight process.

My initial thought is perhaps this anti-corruption unit is itself corrupt, so it’s making up an excuse to justify its own existence.

As for high profile corruption being swept under the rug- what I know of Zelenskyy suggests he would be less likely to turn a blind eye to that. I could of course be wrong though. And I suspect if he brings a high profile treason corruption case against a few well known people and has them jailed or shot for treason, that will send a very strong message to the rest that this isn’t tolerated anymore.
That will of course put a target on Zelenskyy’s back, but that’s always been the case (especially since Russia invaded).