Turkey and Azerbaijan seem unsatisfied with anything short of the total conquest of Armenia, so Pashinyan has invoked Article 4 (ha. ha. ha) of the CSTO and put Putin in a hard place. Honestly I would have Biden advise the Armenian government that as long as they unofficially abandon any plans of ever relieving NK, NATO forces will tutor tens of thousands of their professional personnel in combined arms defense and irregular warfare.
Ukrainian air assault in Kharkiv (could just be transport?) [VIDEO]
Well understood by those without partisan interest in lying or playing the fool.As war began, Putin rejected a Ukraine peace deal recommended by aide
Vladimir Putin's chief envoy on Ukraine told the Russian leader as the war began that he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv that would satisfy Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO, but Putin rejected it and pressed ahead with his military campaign, according to three people close to the Russian leadership.
The Ukrainian-born envoy, Dmitry Kozak, told Putin that he believed the deal he had hammered out removed the need for Russia to pursue a large-scale occupation of Ukraine, according to these sources. Kozak's recommendation to Putin to adopt the deal is being reported by Reuters for the first time.
Putin had repeatedly asserted prior to the war that NATO and its military infrastructure were creeping closer to Russia's borders by accepting new members from eastern Europe, and that the alliance was now preparing to bring Ukraine into its orbit too. Putin publicly said that represented an existential threat to Russia, forcing him to react.
But, despite earlier backing the negotiations, Putin made it clear when presented with Kozak's deal that the concessions negotiated by his aide did not go far enough and that he had expanded his objectives to include annexing swathes of Ukrainian territory, the sources said. The upshot: the deal was dropped.
Very quick check (not differentiating between fronts, but likely >90% from Kharkiv): In the week+ 9/6 through 9/13, Oryx recorded roughly 110 tank and 210 AFV* losses by Russia. This includes probably 50 T-72B3 variants (post-Cold War), the pre-war skeleton of the VSRF tank force making up at least 50% of all active service tanks. And remember, the Kharkiv front was arguably Russia's lowest priority for armor deployments given the distribution of forces (other than the 1st Guards Tank Army remnants). The critical piece confirming the semi-organized nature of the abandonment of the Izyum bridgehead is that whole depots stocked with tanks in various states of repair have been found scattered throughout the liberated territory, yet SPGs come in dribs and drabs. If we're speaking of all barrel artillery, my very rough assessment of the force composition of Russians in Kharkiv is that there should be about as many tanks as cannons - yet the documented losses of the former far exceed those of the latter. Perhaps even more telling is that zero Russian SAM systems have been recovered in Kharkiv. Russians really prioritized saving their artillery and air defense (pending the documentation of some prodigious cache). Nevertheless, there's at least another few hundred AFVs and tanks remaining to be logged from Kharkiv.
If it comes down to human waves of Russian conscripts with AK47s backed by North Korean shells, Ukraine can still retain the balance of power.
*I categorize all APC, IFV, and IMV as AFV
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