Hi Jaye! Thank you for reply!
Sorry to hear about your surgery, but apparently all surgeons are the same. Mine also didn't give any guarantees and said that if it doesn't work out this time, we'll do another operation. At least that's honest.
Good news and bad news. Life goes on and of course for people what happens next to them is more important than what happens on the other side of the globe. This is normal.
As for mobilization, the problem is not in it, but in how it happens. I don't understand what's the point of ruining the lives of millions if you only need a hundred thousand? Even the russians didn't do that.
The army itself also seems to have remained Soviet, run by Soviet officers and the Supreme Commander, who are known for not wanting to hear bad news.
https://xxtomcooperxx.substack.com/p/ukraine-war-11-july-2024-mobutu-syndromeHowever, what we see is only the tip of the iceberg. I recently read an interview for the BBC with the famous Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who was in a russian prison and is now serving in the army. I think his words can be trusted:
"We have many achievements in the use of drones, we have developed new combat tactics, but at the management level we remain the old Soviet army. There is no national planning and standards at the general level. We continue to live by statutes written in the 1990s and 2000s. In general, this is a continuation of the old Soviet tradition. If we go to NATO, we have to use their protocols.
In Ukraine now, most of the battalion commanders are combat officers. But there are generals in the headquarters who continue to work in the old way. No one wants to break bad news upstairs. "The situation is difficult, but under control" - it has already become a meme. We do not have an after action review procedure, that is, an analysis of errors after an operation at the platoon, company, battalion level. You are expected to either complete the task and then you are good, or you are not. But war cannot always have a positive result. It is necessary to understand why the result is negative.
We had a counteroffensive in the south in the summer of 2023. Nowhere after that was there a closed discussion among the military about exactly what went wrong.
Each general has his own army. Everyone is "Zhukov" or "Napoleon". He is trying to report to the top that he did this and that and that. But how many people he lost is not important.
There were some slogans and PR campaigns. But in fact it is the same Soviet army.
There are small units where such standards are implemented. There are separate brigades where the commander focuses a lot on this. There are units that do "double bookkeeping", that is, they work according to the NATO TLP protocol (Troop leading procedure - a NATO standard that determines the sequence of actions of a company or platoon commander during a combat mission. - Ed.) and upstairs they report, as required by our charter.
So we will never join NATO."
https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/articles/cd1rmpjelvroOn July 24, around 2:00 p.m., a number of observation posts of the 1st and 3rd battalions of the 31st brigade were completely surrounded in the east of Ukraine. The brigade commander never gave the order to break through, so the personnel who were in that area confronted him with the fact that the boys would break through with a fight. This incident should serve as a reminder to many commanders not to neglect personnel and trust the NCOs and officers on the direct line of action.
https://v-variant.com.ua/unochi-biytsiam-31-ombr-vdalosia-z-boiamy-prorvatysia-z-otochennia-u-rayoni-prohresu/Against the background of fragments of a russian drone discovered in Romania, NATO declared that it had no information about a "deliberate attack" on the territory of the Alliance. This was stated by the representative of the Alliance, writes Sky News.
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-putin-russia-moscow-latest-updates-sky-news-blog-12541713?postid=8020170#liveblog-bodyIt seems that faith in the defense of NATO is falling rapidly. So I'm not surprised that Poland could become one of Europe’s most prominent security actors. Between 2022 and 2023, its defence budget grew in real terms by 46 per cent. In 2025, Warsaw plans a further 10 per cent increase in its defence budget. But for Poland to take on a leading role in European defence and security efforts, simply increasing defence spending will not be enough. It will also need to develop a long-term, strategic vision for defence, which guides procurement and capability development.
https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/poland-could-be-europes-rising-star-on-defence-and-security/ The President of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, said that it would be impossible to hold negotiations on the end of the war in Ukraine without russia and China at the same table.
https://ruski.radio.cz/prezident-chehii-bez-uchastiya-rossii-i-kitaya-mirnye-peregovory-budut-8823805
