The whole reason why this battle goes so long already seems a bit fishy. "Bleed the Russians dry at low cost" - from my limited expertise the UAF is bleeding as hard as the Russkies in this area. So why hold on for this rather insignificant town?
The reason is that Russia is heavily shelling one insigificant town instead of half a dozen others. Even if losses are the same, and its seems like that's not the case, one UKA brigade is tying up a disproportionate number of Russian troops who are trying to take Bakhmut instead of trying to push Ukraine back from their main rail hubs in the North. Russia cannot leave the area around Bakhmut in Ukrainian hands and be able to secure their claimed provinces, so the longer Ukraine holds on the longer Russia is halted from doing much of anything else; Every shell fired at the ruins of Bakhmut is one that isn't be lobbed at apartment blocks elsewhere.
You are huffing some serious soviet-grade copium if you think China will lend-lease to Russia. The most you'll see is China working to slip some banned electronics over the border. Sort of like Russia is keeping back the best of its jets & armor in fear of embarrassing losses (well, more embarrassing losses) China isn't going to want to have domestic audiences see the smouldering wrecks of J-20s when the encounter real air defense and jingoist propaganda proves to be ineffective against real missiles.
Leopard 2 Tanks reported to be in Chasiv Yar west of Bakhmut. Wagner is saying several brigades of UAF troops have amassed behind the main front line and are preparing to attack.
I would want to see some confirmation from someone else.
My other thought is that if we're seeing troops massing at Bahkmut, that might mean we're getting ready to see push on Svatove.
He's the Yooknik version of a moderately grounded Vatnik. He is high as fucking balls on Ukraine copium and deep throating the Ukraine narrative, but his analysis is closer to reality and he does express some doubts when things seem to good to be true. But maybe that's just because the Ukraine propaganda being closer the reality than Russia's.
And (unless I'm mixing him up with another Yooknik) he does the annoying thing where even if nothing is going on he'll pad it out to 10 minutes for algorithm.
I disagree with that, that border was internationally recognized as being that of North Vietnam. The US pushed the envelope of what Russia and China would accept when they started their bombing of the North. If they had sent troops Russia and China would have intervened, as they said they would (and as China did in Korea).
If you read Max Hastings book 'Vietnam', it makes clear it was that the US completely misunderstood what was happening diplomatically. They assumed North Vietnam was a Russian proxy, in actuality the Russian government was begging the North to make a deal, and the Vietnamese were able to exert enormous pressure on the Soviets (and to a lesser extent the Chinese who the Vietnamese despised) to do what they wanted.
[...]
If the US invaded North Vietnam, and Brezhnev didn't immediately order a military response, he'd have been gone in hours.
All those US Carriers on Yankee Station, they wouldn't have been there long. Thailand and the Philippines would have noped out of a conflict very quickly so the US would have been stuck trying to fight off entire Chinese and NVA divisions, with Russian Air and Naval support.
Without turning this into vietnam chat (South Vietnam's government was fucked, US shouldn't have been there, 'victory' [korea] was possible but wasn't worth another 50,000 US casualties so the guys in charge would say they were capitalist not communist)
China didn't like Vietnam, and relations with the USSR were failing ever since the death of Mao's mancrush Stalin. The real concern was while vietnam could be isolated navally, Russia had overland access via China which probably wouldn't have borne out.
That said, while yes neither China nor the USSR would have accepted the complete take over of North Vietnam, but the US could have still curb stomped North Vietnam's troop concentrations. You can look at
Sino-Vietnamese War and see what an acceptable curbing would have looked like: A punitive invasion to fully sack-tap the North, clearly denoted to the USSR and China as a non-permanent incursion. In the wake of Tet, given the North had violated the UN ceasefire line with offical uniformed NVA troops it would have stood to international diplomatic scrutiny as "they fucked around, they get to find out".
Bombing would haven't accomplished what boot could do: There was nothing worth bombing in the north after a few years of the airwar starting in earnest, and the PR to say nothing of intelligence.
But again, unless you had the politcal will to shut down the Ho Chi Minh trail, the most it'd have done is delayed the inevitable.
Which is why when the official NVA showed up and gave MACV something to destroy, they seized the opportunity.
Also, given Russian performance thus far, I think you're over estimating Russia's ability to project control over Yankee Station. Russian subs at the time were jokes.
It [ ... ]remained a total basket case for decades.
This is a change from the operations of the pre-invasion government... how?
I'm not saying the borders didn't move, but wars that would have seen the complete removal of a political entity from the map in Europe only saw war booty taken from the loser while the political establishment and bureaucracy remained in place.
He's also forgetting that Brazil was the third power to purchase a dreadnought battleship. Granted they had to buy it from the UK's yards due to a lack of native industry but even so they kicked off a dreadnought race that saw Argentina buy
two dreadnoughts of their own from the USA.
Corrupt incompetent governments can still buy fancy toys. And it doesn't negate my point about internal threats being more of a concern than external ones: The only time those Brazilian battleships fired a shot in anger,
it was against their own countrymen.
