i’d brag too if i traded some cheap dinky drones for millions worth of planes.
but it seems like the lost was not in the billions like it’d be if the airstrip was full of b2-like bombers no?
might be time for china take back sea-cucumber bay from russia by using the ‘we have nukes’ deterrent card offensively like russia.
If Russia felt the need to replace the lost planes, could they do so under Western sanctions currently? I have read here that heir economy is largely untouched by Western sanction attempts and is strong and expanding. The older stuff might not even have the tooling around anymore for manufacturing. Like our B-52s, when they go offline they aren’t replaced anymore.
The fact that Russia has no replacement for their bombers is because during the cold war all those aircraft were made by Ukraine on Ukraine Tooling and with Ukraine skill sets. Those skills never made it to the soviet east, or to Moscow or St. Petersburg. I honestly think Vlad thinks the band can be put back together, Ukraine, Poland, and start making quality high end arms [sic] with some mythical skillsets in the population of Ukraine. That brainpower is now in finance and western engineering firms. In that the more he is degraded as a world power, the more he digs in knowing he must win for Soviet 2.0 to work and regather the peers to Moscowvites. Not sane, but a mental construct that fits.
That your average Muscovite is a full blown westerner, a drunk or a government embedded thief goes over his head.