Elerond

Little correction, Saudi-Arabia bought 300 MIM-104E GEM-T (2018 upgrade version of PAC-2) Patriot missiles with 3 Billion and dollars (so only ~10 million dollars each ), deal included separate sale of THAAD missiles to UEA worth of 2.25 billion dollars. Single MIM-104E GEM-T is enough to shoot down any drone, ballistic/cruise missile, but problem is targeting. Saudi-Arabia uses their own variants of Patriot launchers and radars. If Saudi-Arabia needs to shoot multiple missiles to ensure interception, there is probably issues in how well their radars can identify targets and their trajectories and how fell their fire control coordinate launch to launcher in best position to intercept. Missiles' own guidance system can do only limited amount to redirect it if original targeting was wrong.

That seem bit expensive to shoot 16 missiles to intercept one, when you are paying 5 billion dollars for 300 missiles. Maybe Saudi's should upgrade their targeting systems.

As president they will call up council meetings and select most of the agenda that council will address in their meetings. And their job is to oversee any crisis and keep other council members up to date. So council will probably not even talk about the Ukraine's situation.

US constitution protects those rights as well as Russian's constitutions. as long as people in power are willing to abide their laws. There seem to appear more and more censorship laws all around US these days. And they don't target offensive speech or hate speech but educational speech. So US constitution seems to become more and more a paper that just promises rights and protections but is overruled by state governments left and right. And people's respect towards US supreme court also seems to be in heavy decline which does not bode well for constitutional protections. Legally Germany has constitution that offers some of best protections for people's rights as it forbids changing those rights, but does not prevent courts interpreting those rights as limited. But for example Germany is far ahead US when it comes to freedom of press, so there seems to be somethings that Germany's constitution (or culture) has succeed to protect better than US constitution.

Germany's constitution puts lots of limits for government and making amendments to it needs very unified Germany and it forbids amendments to basics rights, which are defined in eternity clause to make them 'eternal' German constitutional rights which can't be changed by democratic process

Not sure how much better pictures you get from high altitude balloon than satellite

He seem to want to annex parts or even whole Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia, remove political rights from Bosnians. He for example put ultimatum that Croatia will not support Finland's and Sweden's Nato membership if west does not support special rights for Bosnia and Herzegovina's Croats, although Croatian government just ignored his statements. So it should not be surprise that he has warm feelings to like minded leaders. Even though what is said is reported by our news they are mostly just ignored by people as president doesn't hold much of real power in Croatian . Prime minister leads the government, which holds power to do any meaningful decisions.

They use same facilities to refurbish than they use to build new ones. Refurbishing is faster, although that depends lots of how long vehicle has been in storage, but still they don't have known facilities even refurbish their stored vehicles in that speed.

Russia has not capacity to produce 170 tanks or 375 IFVs in 3 months. Russia's own estimate of their production capacity is 200-250 tanks in year, from which most are T-72 variables. Highest known number of produced tanks in Russia after year 1993 has been 175 in 2008, which was more than rest of the world combined in that year (most of them were produced to for other countries mainly India). Even though Russia has facilities to produce quite lot tanks in year, it is questioned if they have enough components to do them as their production lines have relied to Western especially German components. Soviet Union and Russia were able to produce 339 BMP-3s between 1987-1994 and Russia ,as far as is known, has not increased their BMP-3 production capacity. They also are capable to produce BMP-1 and BMP-2 variants but not so much that they could produce 375 IFVs in 3 months. Russia has produced ~900 self-propelled artilleries (889 2S19 Msta variants and 10-30 2S35 Koalitsiya-SV) between 1988 and now, so they probably can't make 200 of them in 3 months especially when 2S19 Msta are build on same facilities as T-72s causing need to decide which they will if they want to make both tanks and self-propelled artilleries APC is so general term that it is probably possible to produce 1000 vehicles that you could call APC in 3 months.

Swiss news paper speculated that reason behind Germany's reluctance is that Rheinmetall is updating their production facilities to produce their new Panther KF51, and their don't currently have capacity of replace tanks donated to Ukraine and they fear that they will lose European market to General Dynamics, which is probably reason why Germany wants US to donate their tanks too, so that General Dynamics needs to replace those first before they can start to poach Rheinmetall's customers.

Two members of Finland's parliament started to campaign for pan EU effort to give Leopard 2s to Ukraine in late last year and they were successful in their efforts to find allies all around and not least among German security policy pundits. But as giving Leopards to Ukraine needs permission from Germany and support from Krauss-Maffei, which has now lead to free Leopards campaign in Germany.

Interesting thing is that facial recognition tech they use was developed by group of Russian hackers that first used it to dox Russian porn actress in order to shame/black mail them, but now it is used to find people who were first gleeful when it was released. https://globalvoices.org/2016/04/22/facial-recognition-service-becomes-a-weapon-against-russian-porn-actresses/

My original point was that Ukraine's Orthodox announced calendar reform 24th of December of this year (according to Gregorian calendar), that they will switch to use Gregorian calendar (Of course full calendar reform probably will take sometime). So in future Russian orthodox church will be last major orthodox church that will use Julian calendar.

Do you mean Julian? Question does it matter if Russia does not have much of Ukrainian Orthodox, in case of thinking that "since they're Orthodox." is explanation for something when Orthodox churches have started to split which calendar they use? Orthodox like all Christians celebrate Christmas December 25th, but Orthodox churches didn't switch to use Gregorian calendar, when it was released probably because it was done by Catholic church. 25th of December by Julian calendar currently hits to January 7th in Gregorian calendar (date is slowly moving towards summer because Julian calendar does not have leap years to even out fact that Earth doe not go around the Sun in 365 days, but in 365.256 days).

These days it probably needs to be specified as Russian Orthodox as Ukraine's Orthodox church moved to use Gregorian calendar and had their Christmas already

It seems that Musk's freedom of speech and democracy project is going well https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitter-suspends-journalists-covering-elon-musk-company-rcna62032 "Musk later joined the discussion, but briefly — getting out his talking points and then leaving abruptly. He had earlier put up a poll with a variety of options, asking whether or when he should reinstate the journalists’ accounts. When a plurality of respondents voted to restore the accounts immediately, he deleted the poll and started a new one with fewer options."

Russia does not have dedicated anti-air counter force, so their result maybe even less impressive as their HIMARS hunting. As anti-air platforms are usually in deep in enemy territory (especially long range systems like patriot) where only air force is able to operate with some efficiently and anti-air systems are designed to counter and destroy air force units. So it is quite suicidal job for anyone doing it.

At least Russia acts fast, as they soldiers were already securing rights of Russian speaking Ukrainian's just month after law was introduced

Where they get big sunk of foreign money in cash?

Yes, but you can't get them big sunk from bank as when someone deposit them in bank they go to be destroyed. So you would probably not see many of them used as bribes by foreign governments

It maybe only legitimate bill there as 500 euro bills were discontinued in 2019

Yep, Israel's jewish colonies in Palestinian also fully support jewish control of those areas.

They are all occupied countries, which France and UK have exploited and still do exploit. UK's overseas territories still don't have representation in parliament of UK, even though there should be , irrevocably guaranteed for all UK's citizens to have the same rights and representation they would have if born in England. So those territories are in subordinate states to main UK and therefore they are colonies. France gives better representation to its overseas territories, but they also lack equality to main France and are therefore colonies. EDIT: continuation of this topic belongs to general politics thread not here Ukraine thread.

All of them (when speaking of native population, in most of them french and british people make majority of population), making them independence these days almost impossible EDIT: France assassinated leaders of independence movements in Africa way after WW2. UK was not much nicer to its colonies. They just didn't have resource to keep bigger territories.

Native people of French Guiana, French Polynesia, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Mayotte, New Caledonia, Réunion, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon and Wallis and Futuna probably would disagree with that sentiment. There are also some people in British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar (especially after brexit), Anguilla, Bermuda, Montserrat, Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno Islands, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands who also disagree with the sentiment.