In late March, Simple Flying reported Russia’s S7 Airlines was bringing back old IL-96 and IL-86 quad jets aircraft into service. In addition, Yuri Slyusar also said the UAC would be looking to increase production of the long-range IL-96 passenger aircraft and IL-76 transport planes in the near future. Restarting or expediting production of decades-old aircraft may serve the purpose of populating Russia’s commercial aviation fleet. However, it will still drag the country’s aviation sector back by at least a few decades. Modern commercial aircraft made in the West outperform old Russian designs in efficiency, comfort, and every other aspect. It will be interesting to see how Russia copes with the sanctions going forward.
RUSSIAN MIGHT
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PATRICK LANCASTER—Russian Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) Forces Prepare For Heavy Push In Kharkov Region. In this report I show a unique and exclusive look into how the LPR forces prepare for battle In the Kharkov region. This location is a special training ground for the mobilization soldiers of the LPR to prepare for battle in the Kharkov region of Ukraine
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Andrei Martyanov remains unimpressed with the West’s wisdom and competence (hint: it will get a lot worse!)
33 minutes readANDREI MARTYANOV—What Macgregor describes here is incompetence. It is not a bug but a feature of which I write non-stop for a decade, at least. They ARE that ignorant, they ARE that stupid, and, yes, they ARE that incompetent and a massive body of empirical evidence supports these assertions. But that is what defines a systemic crisis. Read the whole piece, it is worth it, not to mention the fact that I applaud Macgregor’s description of Kissinger’s “strategy” in Vietnam–a recurring story for Washington. And Macgregor concludes it with what I warned for 8 years now, when stated in late 2014-early 2015 that the US has sustained a massive defeat.
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Dmitri Orlov on the riddle of “Russian patience”
26 minutes readDMITRI ORLOV—So, all that Russia has to do is take out some bridges and some port facilities by launching rockets from pretty much anywhere, then kettle and destroy the relatively small contingent of invaders, and it will be game over. NATO knows this, and so all of this activity in the Baltics is just a way to funnel some money to the economically anemic and rapidly depopulating Baltic states.
They are suffering already; why hurt them more? As for the rights of the Russians in Latvia, one might think that they don’t really mind having them violated—or they’d be moving to Russia where there is plenty of room for them. They deserve lots of moral support, of course, but it’s really their battle, not Russia’s.
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Will they ever learn? (answer: probably not)
11 minutes readTHE SAKER—One more thing: assuming that Russia fired somewhere in the range of 200 missiles (out of stocks, having many thousands more) against power stations, communications nodes, railway infrastructure, command posts, field headquarters, transformers, etc., and that this was more than enough to “pull the plug” on a huge country like Ukraine, tells you all you need to know about both the Russian capabilities and the lack of capabilities of Ukronazi air defenses (including old Soviet-era S-300 slamming into the ground the same way US Patriot missiles did during the Gulf War).