Also a way to solve the problem of overfilled prisons.

Just hoping this will bite Russia in the ass later on.

How generous of them /s.

Basic weapons, such as missiles and shells, remain essential. But Ukraine's armed forces need key military capabilities and technologies to break out of this kind of war. The most important one is air power. Control of the skies is essential to large-scale ground operations. At the start of the war we had 120 warplanes. Of these, only one-third were usable.

Russia's air force has taken huge losses and we have destroyed over 550 of its air-defence systems, but it maintains a significant advantage over us and continues to build new attack squadrons. That advantage has made it harder for us to advance. Russia's air-defence systems increasingly prevent our planes from flying. Our defences do the same to Russia. So Russian drones have taken over a large part of the role of manned aviation in terms of reconnaissance and air strikes.

Drones must be part of our answer, too. Ukraine needs to conduct massive strikes using decoy and attack drones to overload Russia's air-defence systems. We need to hunt down Russian drones using our own hunter drones equipped with nets. We must use signal-emitting decoys to attract Russian glide bombs. And we need to blind Russian drones' thermal cameras at night using stroboscopes.

This points to our second priority: electronic warfare (ew), such as jamming communication and navigation signals. EW is the key to victory in the drone war.

The third task is counter-battery fire: defeating enemy artillery. In this war, as in most past wars, artillery, rocket and missile fire make up 60-80% of all the military tasks. When we first received Western guns last year, we were quite successful at locating and striking Russian artillery. But the effectiveness of weapons such as Excalibur, a gps-guided American shell, has declined dramatically owing to improved Russian electronic warfare.

Meanwhile, Russia's own counter-battery fire has improved. This is largely thanks to its use of Lancet loitering munitions, which work alongside reconnaissance drones, and its increasing production of precision-guided shells that can be aimed by ground spotters.

The fourth task is mine-breaching technology. We had limited and outdated equipment for this at the start of the war. But even Western supplies, such as Norwegian mine-clearing tanks and rocket-powered mine-clearing devices, have proved insufficient given the scale of Russian minefields, which stretch back 20km in places. When we do breach minefields, Russia quickly replenishes them by firing new mines from a distance.

The Commander-In-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces on What He Needs to Beat Russia

According to lawmaker Yoo Sang-bum, the South Korean National Intelligence Service believes the North shipped more than a million artillery shells to Russia through ships and other transport means since early August to help boost Russia's warfighting capabilities in Ukraine. Those shells would roughly amount to two months' worth of supplies for the Russians, Yoo said.

South Korea's Spy Agency Says North Korea Shipped More Than a Million Artillery Shells to Russia

“Ukraine’s counteroffensive is not going as expected … It has not changed the fate of the conflict, and everyone understands that [the conflict] could last many years if we don’t find a solution. The Ukrainians are doing what they have to do and we are trying to help them.”

‘Tiredness On All Sides’ Over War in Ukraine, Italian PM Tells Prank Caller | Giorgia Meloni | The Guardian

Yeah, I'm tired too. Tired of the West's pathetic display.

Being beaten by fucking North Korea in shells.

PM of Italy: "not going as expected"

Also Italy:

https://app.23degrees.io/view/tAuBi41LxvWwKZex-bar-stacked-horizontal-figure-2_csv_final

I like how Italy does pretty much nothing to help and still expects to see better results. 

Meloni's government partners are, unlike herself, very much against supporting Ukraine (pretty much to the same level of Putin support instead as Orban does), and she had to put them in place more than once because of this. I'm very sure that her partners more than once blocked any support from Italy for Ukraine. To be fair though, Italy doesn't have very much suitable equipment for the Ukraine theatre; they have a big surplus of their Puma 4x4 and 6x6 APC which are getting phased out, but wheeled vehicles are not too useful in the mud of Ukraine. They could possibly send some Centauros or Ariete, but certainly also their Skyguard Aspide systems, as they're getting replaced by CAMM.

France could also do much more, their support so far has been pretty weak. While I can understand why they don't send any tanks (Leclerc is out of production with the tooling already dismantled, so no new ones can be build and no successor in sight), they could definitely send more VAB (they already had 510 of it's successor by end of 2022, and France only sent 60 VAB in summer of 2022). But more importantly, France could do a lot more in terms of artillery and air defense for Ukraine (Looks like France heard my thoughts and have pledged 30 Caesar SPGs to Ukraine in October).

Looking at the list, I was aghast that Ireland send less than Luxembourg. We have less than 1000 soldiers here in our "Army" in Luxembourg for Christ's sake, of course we can't send much, so sending less than that is truly pathetic. I mean, just compare the lists for Luxembourg and Ireland on Oryx's blog...

Just feels like the West wants Ukraine to win but not too quickly out of fear of what a quick collapse would do to Russia so instead hope for a slow bleed out of Russia and the delusional hope that Putin will eventually see sense, that and some countries are unwilling to actually take hits to their military, despite the fact that nobody threatens them directly and the only one who could (Russia) is currently fighting Ukraine. We spend a gross amount of money on military and it feels like it's all just for show if the time we should actually be using it most, we aren't.

People will say we need to save everything for Taiwan but you know what would convince China to attack Taiwan more than anything? If Russia wins, China will have the perfect template of how to beat the West and it's very simple, just wait us out, we'll eventually grow frustrated and bored if a war last longer than a couple of years. I don't even think most of Europe would aid America with Taiwan but that's another topic. We should demolish Russia and send a message to China that the same will happen to them if they try anything with Taiwan.

Instead North Korea is beating us and Ukraine is asking for fairly simple things but not even the whole collective of America and Europe can supply it to Ukraine in adequate numbers. Ukraine can't just keep accepting hordes of Russians being thrown at them because they aren't receiving enough equipment, enough ammunition, enough artillery rounds, enough drones, enough counter-technology, eventually the swarm will overwhelm and Putin doesn't care how many lives it costs.

Tom Cooper's latest report is despite the horrific losses on the Russians in Avdiivka. They're still taking land because they're just throwing absolutely everything at it and don't care about the losses, Ukraine is running low on artillery to stop the advances and Russia is replacing its artillery with swarms of drones and Ukraine doesn't have enough counter-drone technology. Losing Avdiivka would actually be a bad thing, unlike the Pyrrhic victory of Bakhmut, Ukraine can make it hurt as much as possible for the Russians but losing it would still be bad.

So many things we could have done better, so many things we can still do better, instead we still today debate about red lines and are unwilling to put ourselves in a fraction of an uncomfortable position as Ukraine is putting themselves in for us. We then moan about being tired because the war could last years despite us not doing everything in our power to speed the conclusion of this war up, the reason it is lasting years is because of our reluctance to give Ukraine what it needs.

Putin won't ever see sense. He will happily send more than half of Russia to their deaths and nobody will do a damn thing about it because we range from the sensible Russians having left the country, the ones remaining seeing honour in fighting for Mother Russia, others in it just for the money because of how poor some Russian regions are and the rest too terrified of Putin to do anything. Ukraine may win an attrition war still but I don't want them to win an attrition war, I want as few Ukrainian deaths as possible, I'm not sure some in the West care about that though.