- Biden will not change the current US nuclear doctrine under pressure from allies - Longstanding US policy allows for first-strike use of nukes in extreme situations - Biden had vowed to change that policy but is now backing down from the plan - Ongoing Nuclear Posture Review will not adopt the new 'sole purpose' doctrine - Nukes can still be used to deter conventional, chemical, or biological attack
President Joe Biden is abandoning a campaign vow to alter longstanding US nuclear doctrine, and will instead embrace existing policy that reserves America's right to use nukes in a first-strike scenario, according to multiple reports.
As Russian forces continue their bloody assault on Ukraine, Biden is under pressure from NATO allies not to abandon the right to use nuclear weapons to deter conventional attacks.
Since the Cold War, American policy has allowed for first-strike use of nuclear weapons under 'extreme circumstances,' such as responding to an invasion by conventional forces, or chemical or biological attacks.
But on the campaign trail, Biden had vowed to switch to a 'sole purpose' doctrine, which maintains that the US would only use nuclear weapons to respond to another nation's nuclear attack.
Instead, Biden's recent Nuclear Posture Review reaffirms that nuclear deterrence is the 'fundamental role' of the nuclear arsenal, rather than the 'sole purpose', US officials told the Wall Street Journal.
Though the difference in wording may seem slight, Biden's proposed 'sole purpose' doctrine sparked fears among allies from Europe to Japan, who feared that the change in posture would embolden adversaries.
And given Vladimir Putin's latest moves against Ukraine, NATO allies in particular feared that a shift in policy would encourage Russia to launch new conventional attacks or use chemical weapons, knowing that a nuclear response from the US was out of the question.
Russia currently maintains the world's largest nuclear arsenal with 6,257 warheads compared to America's 5,550, according to the Arms Control Association.
Instead of the 'sole purpose' doctrine, the new Nuclear Posture Review says that the US would only use nuclear weapons in 'extreme circumstances', which is similar to language from prior reviews conducted by both the Obama and Trump administrations.
One insider said that Biden decided to abandon his 'sole purpose' vow specifically after Russia invaded Ukraine.
'You don't want to look weak. It was on the President's desk awaiting his decision, then Ukraine happened,' an arms control expert who consulted with Biden's nuclear policy officials told The Daily Telegraph.
'The optics are extremely bad when Russia is being as threatening as it is,' the person said.
U.S. officials told the Journal that said the administration’s review is also expected to lead to cuts in two nuclear systems that were embraced by the Trump administration.
If Congress agrees, it would mean canceling a program to develop a nuclear sea-launched cruise missile and retiring the B83 thermonuclear bomb.
However, the review does support the extensive modernization of the U.S. nuclear triad: land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-based missiles, and bombers, which is projected to cost over $1 trillion.
A large Russian ship has been destroyed, and two others are on fire, according to the Ukrainian military.
Sharing images and a video on social media, the Ukrainian military claim a large Russian ship has been destroyed near the southern port city of Berdyansk.
In a post on Facebook, Ukraine's Navy says a large landing vessel - the "Orsk" - was hit in the Sea of Azov this morning.
The post claims: “The Orsk large landing ship of the Black Sea Fleet of the occupiers has been destroyed in the port of Berdyansk captured by Russia.
According to media reports in Ukraine one Russian ship has sunk and two others are on fire, after an ammunition depot and a fuel warehouse were hit. It has not possible to confirm this information from external sources however images and footage show a significant fire with a video appearing to show a missile hitting a boat.
Russia captured Berdyansk weeks ago and has been using the port for refuelling. It lies between Crimea and the besieged city of Mariupol.
European leaders will today meet at a G7, Nato and European Union summit later today, one month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden will be joining European leaders at the summit and is expected to announce a raft of new sanctions against Russia, with Nato members expected to ramp up military forces in Eastern Europe.
President Zelensky will also appear through video link at the meeting and will appeal to Western leaders for more support for Ukraine.
"Delivery systems consist of aircraft, missiles, naval vessels, or artillery.
" The USSR would eliminate its entire global inventory of ground-launched, short-range nuclear weapons, including nuclear artillery shells, short-range ballistic missile warheads, and nuclear land mines."
godofuck231: have you heard about the Russian bubble ( it disorientates defensive missile systems , Biden picked the wrong war The US carrier Donald Cook’s RADAR SYSTEMS Were Disabled By The Russian SU-24 Plane Using A Device Called Khibiny. This device Jams Enemy Radar Systems on The Ground Or On Naval Vessels. The Ship Then Turned Back.
Pierocash: you better wake up from your dream. NATO were ranting before Putin invaded Ukraine,they sounded so tough to the point that they made Zelensky felt secured, but chickened out with the pretense that Ukraine isn't a member of NATO yet,when they saw that Putin got prepared for them and they started talking of Sanction.
Let me clarify a few facts.
1. NATO never promised to intervene in a war between Russia and Ukraine. NATO has been saying this for years now. When Russia took Crimeria, NATO did not get involved; when Russia supported the separatists in the Donbast to take territory from Ukraine, NATO did not get involved. Why should they get involved now ? Ukraine is not a NATO country !!
2. What NATO has been doing since 2014 is providing first class military training to the Ukrainin army and supplying them with weapons for defence.
3. Just before the recent war started with Russia, NATO supplied thousands of anti tank and anti aircraft weapons to Ukraine including armed drones from Turkey. As you can observe from the media, this training and the equipment has been decisive in stalling the Russian offensive.
4. NATO has also been providing military intelligence to the Ukrainian army and this has helped them defend their towns and cities more efficiently.
5. NATO does not want a third world war, but if Russia brings it on, they will fight it. Russia can only resort to nuclear weapons which will obliterate 80% of human life on this earth. In a conventional war, NATO will run over Russia tens times over and still have jara.
6. NATO and allies have imposed historical massive sanctions on Russia which are now on the verge of bringing it to it's knees ( not that I support the sanctions ).
I can bet my balls that NATO won't be foolish enough to sanction Poland for such,they are just ranting. Russia has more nuclear capability than the entire NATO put together. You think NATO doesn't know the capacity of Russia in terms of warfare? You think if Russia is like Iraq US wouldn't have invaded? The other countries they invaded,are they fighting NATO allies?
Russia does not have more nuclear capability than the whole of NATO put together. You guys keep ranting about the TSAR bomb, but only one is functionaly, the other 2 are prototypes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
USA ( & NATO ) have about the same number of nuclear war heads deployed, see table below. The US does not talk about their secret weapons, they use it in real war to the SHOCK of their enemies. Ask Japan - nuclear bomb ( 1945), Serbia - stealth aircraft (24 March 1999 to 10 June 1999), Iraq Tomahawk cruise missiles and bunker busting bombs etc etc.
Pierocash: Is like Poland don't like and cherish their country. By the time Putin finishes with them,Somalia will be like heaven
Putin does not have the balls - NATO have warned him that just ONE TOE over NATO border will trigger a massive response. I hope you know that NATO is the most powerful military alliance in the world. If Russia is struggling with small Ukraine, how can they cope with NATO ?
Drenimarcus: WTF is wrong with Poland? Why are they escalating things? Do they know their country will be decimated before their so called big brother arrives?
Their brother is on the ground already, with 100s of aircraft and ships, thousands of soldiers and hundreds upon hundreds of tanks, drones etc.
As Putin’s army falls apart in Ukraine with hunger, low morale and anger - it appears that Putin may have decided to use small tactical nuclear shells in Ukraine which have very limited scope but can wreck havoc on enemy troops. The logic behind this assumption is the recent deployment of long range artillery capable of firing nuclear tactical shells.
This is very very dangerous territory. NATO had earlier warned Russia that if a nuclear explosion affects a NATO territory, NATO will respond accordingly and decisively.
My worry is that this may quickly escalate into a full blown nuclear war. This year looks grim. Let us pray.
Let me dig up a thread I did on mother Russia and how she is the real graveyard of empires.
From the Swedes to napoleon to the most powerful professional army ever to exist (the Wermerch), mother Russia's cold flat plains has buried a lot of armies.
Russia has lost many wars and some of the wars they won were at a huge cost to their population. For example they had the highest number of casualties during the second world war - circa 28,000,000.
1. First Chechen war 1994–1996 - defeat 2. Soviet–Afghan War 1979–1989 - defeat 3. Angolan Civil War 1975–1991 stalemate 4. Polish–Soviet War 1919–1921 - defeat 5. Finnish Civil War 1918 - defeat 6. Latvian War of Independence 1918–1920 defeat 7. First world war 1914–1918 - defeat 8. War with Japan 1904–1905 - defeat
Yes, they have won many wars at great great cost , but they have been defeated and can be defeated.
The US is playing catch up with Russia. They are not even on the same page with China's hypersonic program.
Russia is a master of Ramjet technologies. They even have a nuclear powered missile that can orbit the earth indefinitely and with submarine drones that can drive below 600m and remain indefinitely in the deep without detection.
Russia went high tech while the US was concentrating on force projection with aircraft carriers.
The Russians even cracked the radar signal for their stealth fighters and bombers making them obsolete.
Russia went lean and mean after the collapse of the soviet union while AmeriKKKa went full bully mode.
The US doesn't even have a solution for the S-400 missile system talk more of the S-500 satellite and missile killer.
All we hear from you and mother Russia is NOISE NOISE and CHEST BEATING. But when it comes to practicals , the army is crap - lmao. Please stop making my laugh , its too late. One month and they cannot capture major cities such as Kyiv, Odessa and Kharkiv.
USA will rule another 400 years? Did you even know that the same Americans have acknowledge to possibilities of The Chinese overtaking them? China is the world number one growing economy. Why do you think the US is crying about China everyday? Now that Russia will give them their full support, e go even happen for this our time no worry
You think a country as large as America, with the mightiest military in history, with huge oil reserves and natural resources will just collapse ? The only events that might destroy the USA are ;
1. Internal bloody civil war which is very possible or 2. Nuclear war which means we all die and there are no winners.
Over 70,000 Ukraine soldiers are dead. This is only in donbas. Azov battalion is over 20,000 men strong in donesk, only a few thousand remaining in Mariupol.. waiting to be destroyed.
Where are your sources ? Exactly ! None whatsoever - lol.
Walkee: all NATO nuclear weapons is still less than 6200 that Russia have. When you hear NATO, just know we are talking about USA. The rest are just figure heads. UK have less than 300 same with France. The rest countries like Latvia, Lithuania, Spain Poland etc are irrelevant pussies hiding behind USA for survival
Total estimated nuclear weapons without Russia is 6,786 and not all of them are deployed for launch. For example, both the US and Russia have an equivalent number of missiles already loaded onto destroyers, submarines , intercontinental ballistic missile systems and bombers. When an attack happens, it will be from multiple directions. Both the USA and Russia are capable of cancelling their countries from the world map, though of course the fall out will impact the entire world.
Without nuclear weapons, the Russian army is third rate.
Russia — 6,257 (1,458 active, 3039 available, 1,760 retired) United States — 5,550 (1,389 active, 2,361 available, 1,800 retired) China — 350 available (actively expanding nuclear arsenal) France — 290 available United Kingdom — 225 available Pakistan — 165 available India — 156 available North Korea — 40-50 available (estimated)
Drenimarcus: Ukraine is losing around 1000 soldiers and militants a day, mostly because of the constant Russian shelling and air strikes. This will inevitably lead to the collapse of the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the eastern front. Mariupol, Sumy, Chernihiv are already completely surrounded and cut off from supplies, Kharkiv is 90% encircled. It doesn’t look so good for Ukraine at the moment. Usually in a war the side with air superiority will win, and it’s Russia in this case.
On the contrary, the statistics you just provided is the latest data we have on the number of Russian soldiers dying daily - thats why their advance has installed and they have now decided to just bomb and bomb cities till they surrender.
The Russian army is not a super power army, it is a third rate army with nuclear weapons.
They think they will remain world power for more years to come. The Roman empire stood for 1,000 years while the Holy Roman Empire stood for 300 years. USA's downfall is inevitable with the daily growth of China. Now that they have unleashed undeserved sanctions on Russia, Russia will work day and night to Make China the next super power. USA days are numbered. They will go down with their once mighty force AKA Britain
Drenimarcus: Lmao, they missed their target and yesterday night, Russia bombed the mall in Kyiv with a sweet Iskander missile. Killed another 80 mercs this morning. They have upped the ante. Even Azovs are now running away to Poland. Yall need to get off nairaland for confirm news.
South Ossetia arrived yesterday, CAR says they wanna fight for Russia, even Syria, Egypt, Serbia are all saying they wanna come and volunteer. The badass spetsnaz are in town. Chenchen guys are doing their thing also.
Real news ;
-15,000 Russian soldiers exterminated - 6 Generals killed -Thousands of equipment destroyed - Chenchen Allah Akbar terrorists - returned to base after suffering heavy losses.
Status on war front - Stalemate
If you support the bombing of civilians you must be as deranged as Putin
And the US discovered that their multi-million budget on the military is futile if Russia still has an upper hand.
Everything about Russia is nuclear..and guess what? 6000 is an understatement!
Not like I support Russia or America, but I know the military too well.
The USA also has hypersonic missiles and guess what ? Over 5000 thermonuclear war heads. So, just as Russia can destroy US cities, the US can destroy Russian cities. And besides, when you add NATO, Russia is up against circa 7000 thermonuclear war heads.
Russia has well over 6,000 thermonuclear war heads with each capable of destroying New York. Add their hypertonic missile capabilities, and the entire east and west coast will be incinerated long before CNN could announce it as breaking news.
The USA also has hypersonic missiles and guess what ? Over 5000 thermonuclear war heads. So, just as Russia can destroy US cities, the US can destroy Russian cities. And besides, when you add NATO, Russia is up against circa 7000 thermonuclear war heads.
Nothing special about the British military. They are always hiding under the apron of the US army. The withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan is a clear pointer to that. The moment the US started pulling out, Britain started scrambling to pull out all her soldiers. If they were that strong, they would not have panickly withdrawn their troops too.
If there is nothing special about the UK army, ask your Nigerian army to fight them and see what happens - lol
The Russian foreign ministry has reportedly warned the US ambassador that the Kremlin is on the verge of severing ties between the nations.
Reuters reported the warning to US Ambassador John Sullivan on Monday morning as Russia continues its assault on Ukraine amid harsh sanctions by the US.
The foreign ministry said it told Mr Sullivan that “unacceptable statements” by US President Joe Biden about Russian President Vladimir Putin had pushed relations between the two countries to a “breaking point”.
Last week, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s joint address to Congress, Mr Biden branded Mr Putin a “war criminal” and “murderous dictator”.
He made the scathing remarks at the annual Friends of Ireland Luncheon on Capitol Hill on 17 March, calling Mr Putin “a pure thug who is waging an immoral war against the people of Ukraine”.
“I think we’re in a genuine struggle between autocracies and democracies and whether or not democracies can be sustained,” Biden said.
The comments set off a war of words with Moscow, with the deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, accusing the US and its allies of a “disgusting” anti-Russian conspiracy.
“It will not work,” Mr Medvedev said last Thursday. “Russia has the might to put all of our brash enemies in their place.”
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for Mr Putin, told reporters: “We believe such rhetoric to be unacceptable and unforgivable on the part of the head of a state, whose bombs have killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world.”
Mr Biden is slated to make a stop in Poland this week during his upcoming trip to Europe for urgent talks with Nato and European allies as Russian forces concentrate their fire upon cities and trapped civilians in the Kremlin’s nearly month-old invasion of Ukraine.
Rugaria: In a bid to flaunt her nonexistent military abilities, Britain led by the clown at No 10 Downing street will make a silly mistake and this dead power of a country will be blown to pieces. Britain has been hyper active since this war started, threatening and confiscating Russias assets left and right..., and I honestly don't understand the point they are trying to prove. It's not like they're anywhere near Russia in military might, so who areghy trying to impress?
Lol, the UK maintains its position as one of the strongest militaries in the world and you know it. And even if they are weak, which African military can match them ? Be honest, name just one.
Meanwhile the UK Javeline missiles have been obliterating scores of overrated Russia tanks in Ukraine.
A few miles on from the roadside shrine to the Ukrainians killed in Stalin’s Great Terror — bleak metal crosses, a slab of granite, birch trees sliding into a dark past — lies the last Ukrainian Army checkpoint. The last, at least, for us.
We are ordered back toward Brovary, the satellite town made famous some days back when the Russian Army’s tanks huddling toward Kyiv were blasted to pieces by the defenders. The site of the tank ambush lay ahead, but a Ukrainian soldier is firm: “Go back.”
To enforce his argument, a big blast sounds, outgoing, coming from the forest to our right. It is not close, but it is not so far away. You learn to tell the difference between outgoing and incoming. Outgoing, there is one bang and the air pressure doesn’t change. Incoming, you can feel it through your boots.
We get in the car, drive back a little bit, hang around at a roadside picnic area, listen to more blasts, see black smoke scribbling lazily against the cold blue sky. Every now and then an ambulance screams down the four-lane highway, heading for Kyiv.
A couple walk toward us, toward the war, and we have a brief chat. Vanya and Natasha are middle-aged, composed, purposeful. Before the war he traded in seafood; she grew cucumbers and salad. “I’ll have a smoked salmon sandwich with cucumber.” Another blast from the woods to our right. “I’m sorry; that’s not available right now.” The Ukrainian sense of humor is a wonder to behold. Natasha is still stern. “I’m going to give you a poor review.”
She laughs too and, for a moment, the war is forgotten while we enjoy our joke and enjoy life. I’m working with Vlad the driver, who picked me up when I hitchhiked to the TV missile attack in Kyiv in the early days of the war, and Eugene, the world’s worst translator, who wore a hair band when we went to the mosque. Coming along for the laughs is Emile Ghessen, a filmmaker from London who, in another life, was a sergeant in the Royal Marines.
Where are Vanya and Natasha going? “Home, the next village along, a mile and a half away.” “Is it in Russian hands?” “No, ours.” “And the next village, under Russian or Ukrainian control?” “No one is sure.”
The Russians are close, maybe 10 miles away, maybe less.
We drive back some more and stop at a gas station for a coffee on the east side of Brovary.
Denis, a thick-set taxi driver, is helping a couple shift their stuff out of their war-damaged car into his vehicle. Most of the front of the car is gone; how it made it to the gas station is one of those miracles of war. The man is grim-faced, silent, the woman wretched, crying. A phone rings and the woman starts a long phone conversation. While this happens Denis takes a drag on his cigarette and talks to us.
I’d heard reports that the Russian Army was not just stalled but that here, on this, the eastern claw of its pincer attack on Kyiv, it was going backward.
“Have the Russians moved?” “No,” says Denis. “They are staying in the same place, neither moving forward or back.” “How are they?” “The villagers say that they are begging for food. They’re so hungry, they come to the villagers and ask for something to eat. The villagers say they are not aggressive. Their commanders want them to fight, to be harsh. But they are too busy asking for scraps to eat.”
So that bit of my reporting was on the money. The other day for New Lines I retold a Reuters story from 2011 that a Russian Army officer was sacked after complaining his boys were fed dog food in tins labeled “prime quality beef.”
The dog food army may not be going backward, but it is not going forward, either. It is more worried about what’s for dinner than besieging Kyiv, and that is not good news for Vladimir Putin.
Nor would the president of Russia fancy face time with Cmdr. Muslim Chiberloevsky. He is fighting against the Russian Army. He has been doing it for a while, since 1991, he tells me in a Georgian restaurant in Kyiv. He’s the leader of a Chechen brigade fighting with the Ukrainians and for a free and independent Chechnya. I ask him what he thinks of Putin’s pet Chechen, Ramzan Kadyrov. The commander’s stern face grows another inch of ice while Eugene translates.
“Kadyrov is not Chechen. He is a traitor.” The commander’s sense that the war is going badly for Russia was backed by someone else, my friend Johnny Mercer, Tory member of Parliament for Plymouth, former defense minister and, again in another life, an officer in the 29th Commando Regiment Royal Artillery. In British Army speak, a (not that dumb) dumb gunner. When in town, he asked the press corps to keep quiet about his presence until he got back, lest he be accused of starting World War III. He’s back in Britain now, so I can share with you how he thinks Putin’s war is going.
Mercer was the former officer I quoted as saying: “Any army that doesn’t look after its dead doesn’t tend to win.” He believes that “Kyiv is too big for Putin’s soldiers to take.” He was fascinated to hear the fragments of information I had picked up, supporting his hypothesis.
The Russian army suffers low morale. It doesn’t look after its dead. Its generals are corrupt. It gives the boys dog food to eat. Its leader is a fearful paranoiac. And his overtures of peace are nonsense. As French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has said, the “Russian logic is based on the usual triptych: indiscriminate bombardments, so-called humanitarian ‘corridors’ designed to then accuse the adversary of not respecting them and talks with no other objective than to pretend to negotiate.”
Back in 2000 I reported how the Russian military bombed a white-flag convoy of refugees in the Chechen village of Katyr Yurt, killing dozens of civilians.
I met an 8-year-old girl with a cruelly burnt face, both hands burnt and bandaged, a broken right leg swathed in plaster, and a left knee pinioned by iron bolts and internal bruising. Yet she wanted to tell us what happened. Her family was squashed into the family’s black Volga saloon, seven of them. She explained how the convoy left Katyr Yurt for what they hoped was safety. “There was a white flag on our car, flying from a wooden stick,” she said. “Then two planes came and they hit us and my dad and mom were sitting in front of us and my brother and [I] were sitting in the back seat. Then we were blown up. I fell to the mud in the ground.”
Everyone else was killed as they traveled through the Russian Army’s safe humanitarian corridor.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The signs are abundant of how Ukraine frustrated Vladimir Putin’s hopes for a swift victory, and how Russia’s military proved far from ready for the fight.
A truck carrying Russian troops crashes, its doors blown open by a rocket-propelled grenade. Foreign-supplied drones target Russian command posts. Orthodox priests in trailing vestments parade Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag in defiance of their Russian captors in the occupied city of Berdyansk.
Russia has lost hundreds of tanks, many left charred or abandoned along the roads, and its death toll is on a pace to outstrip that of the country’s previous military campaigns.
Yet more than three weeks into the war, with Putin’s initial aim of an easy regime change in Ukraine long gone, Russia’s military still has a strong hand. With their greater might and stockpile of city-flattening munitions, Russian forces can fight on for whatever the Russian president may plan next, whether leveraging a negotiated settlement or brute destruction, military analysts warn.
Despite all the determination of Ukraine’s people, all the losses among Russia’s forces, and all the errors of Russia’s leaders, there is no sign that the war will soon be over. Even if he fails to take control of the country, Putin can keep up the punishing attacks on its cities and people.
“His instinct will be always to double down, because he’s got himself into a dreadful mess, a huge strategic blunder,” said Michael Clarke, former head of the British-based Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank.
“And I don’t think it’s in his character to try to retrieve that, except by carrying on, going forward,” he said.
Putin’s forces in Ukraine are waging Russia’s largest, most complex combined military campaign since taking Berlin in 1945. His initial objective, which he announced in a television address on Feb. 24 as the invasion began, was to “demilitarize” Ukraine and save its people from “neo-Nazis,” a false description of Ukraine’s government, which is led by a Jewish president.
Fatefully, Putin underestimated the national pride and battlefield skills that Ukrainians have built up over the past eight years of battling Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.
At the start, Russians thought “they would install, you know, some pro-Russian government and call it a day and declare victory,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, a researcher on Russia’s security at the Virginia-based CNA think tank. “That was sort of Plan A, and as near as we can tell, they didn’t really have a Plan B.”
Russia’s first apparent plan — attack key Ukrainian military targets, and make a quick run to Kyiv — failed immediately. It was foiled by Ukraine’s defenses along with the countless mistakes and organizational failures by a Russian force that had been told it was only mobilized for military drills.
Clarke, the British researcher, related accounts of Russian troops selling communication equipment and fuel out of military vehicles to locals during the weeks they waited on Ukraine’s borders.
With no friendly population to welcome them, Russian forces reverted to tactics from their past offensives in Syria and Chechnya — dropping bombs and lobbing missiles into cities and town, sending millions of men, women and children fleeing.
Putin’s forces are in position to capture the besieged port city of Mariupol. Overall, Russians appear to be fighting with three objectives now: to surround Kyiv, to encircle spread-out Ukrainian fighters in the east, and to break through to the major port city of Odessa in the west, said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and program director at CNA.
Kofman cautions that much of the information on the war is coming from Ukrainians, or their American or other allies. That makes the partial picture skewed, and a full picture impossible.
A senior U.S. defense official on Friday said the Russians have launched more than 1,080 missiles since the start of the war as they remain largely stalled across the country. The official said they retain about 90% of the combat power they had arrayed around Ukraine at the start of the war.
The U.S. assesses that the airspace over Ukraine remains contested, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the military assessments. The Ukrainian air force is continuing to fly aircraft and employ air and missile defense
“Just look at the map, and you just look at how little progress the Russians have been able to make,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said recently.
The math of military conquests and occupation may be against Putin in Ukraine.
Estimates of Russian deaths vary widely. Yet even conservative figures are in the low thousands. That’s a much faster pace than in previous Russian offensives, threatening support for the war among ordinary Russians. Russia had 64 deaths in five days of fighting during its 2008 war with Georgia. It lost about 15,000 in Afghanistan over 10 years, and more than 11,000 over years of fighting in Chechnya.
Russia’s number of dead and wounded in Ukraine is nearing the 10% benchmark of diminished combat effectiveness, Gorenburg said. The reported battlefield deaths of four Russian generals — out of an estimated 20 in the fight — signal impaired command, he said.
Researchers tracking only those Russian equipment losses that were photographed or recorded on video say Russia has lost more than 1,500 tanks, trucks, mounted equipment and other heavy gear. Two out of three of those were captured or abandoned, signaling the failings of the Russian troops that let them go.
Meanwhile, Russia needs to limit its use of smart, long-range missiles in case they’re needed in any larger war with NATO, military analysts say.
When it comes to the grinding job of capturing and holding cities, conventional military metrics suggest Russia needs a 5-to-1 advantage in urban fighting, analysts say. Meanwhile, the formula for ruling a restive territory in the face of armed opposition is 20 fighters for every 1,000 people — or 800,000 Russian troops for Ukraine’s more than 40 million people, Clarke notes. That’s almost as many as Russia’s entire active-duty military of 900,000.
On the ground, that means controlling any substantial chunk of Ukrainian territory long-term would take more resources than Russia could foreseeably commit.
Other Russian options remain possible, including a negotiated settlement. Moscow is demanding that Ukraine formally embrace neutrality, thus swearing off any alliance with NATO, and recognize the independence of the separatist regions in the east and Russian sovereignty over Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
Russia’s other options include an unrelenting air campaign in which it bombs and depopulates cities as it did in Chechnya and Syria. U.S. officials also warn of the risk of Russian chemical attacks, and the threat of escalation to nuclear war.
“Unless the Russians intend to be completely genocidal — they could flatten all the major cities, and Ukrainians will will rise up against Russian occupation — there will be just constant guerrilla war” if Russian troops remain, Clarke said.
——
Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed.
Family / Breaking - Explosions Rock Huge Russian Military Ship In The Black Sea by NigeriaNawa: 7:33pm On Mar 26, 2022 
