Comments by "N Velsen" (@nvelsen1975) on "Naval war is back after grain deal collapse" video.

The Russian propaganda has openly stated things like 'Russia is only sending 15% of its army' and 'They're only sending the oldest gear first' and 'Russia is so ineffective because they want to be humanitarian and not risk collatoral damage'. They have been pushing the 'one arm behind the back' myth quite a lot.
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One thing people forget though: On the scale of economics and economic devastation from war, a few grainships are peanuts for Ukraine. Grainships or not, western financial support mainly from the EU is already a 'do or die' issue for them. So effectively, the cost of losing a few potential grain ships is minimal for Ukraine. So Putin is taking a huge gamble of being blamed globally and this escalation, all to do something that isn't really that valuable for Ukraine. Or in different words: Russia loses more over this than Ukraine does, ergo it's good warfare.
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Putin is a genius though. He really understands that the enemy can't know his plans, if he doesn't have a clue what he's doing. 😉
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@paulpaisley5291 The fighters-bombers that can detect Russian combat air patrols from two times the distance that they can, and have fire&forget support. The current confrontations between Russian gear and F16's sits at 100% win rate for the F16 pilots. Like the Dutch shootdown of a modernised mig29 from the Serbian airforce. By the time the Russian gear detects, an AMRAAM can already be flying.
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@stevengrice1807 It is whatever we decide it is. Erdogan can really use an armed confrontation to draw attention away from his own failings. A limited Black Sea war would be his Falklands. And if Ankara calls London today that the Montreux convention has been suspended due to Russia perpetrating hostilities against Turkey, pretty sure that within a few weeks Russian ships suddenly start exploding in a way that suspiciously looks like they ate a British torpedo.
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Yes and no. Earlier on Chinese citizens were murdered by Russian troops. Beijing said 'stop it', it happened again. This lead to the famous 'wolf warrior tweet'. Which showed Beijing is angry at that as Putin makes them lose face. So this will definately anger Beijing, but will it prompt them into action? So far all that's happened is Putin got on his knees and begged for Chinese weapons, and Beijing didn't even pick up the phone, that's why they went to North Korea instead. But what else is China willing to do? It's a public secret that Hong Kong is the base of a lot of Russian shell companies to circumvent the sanctions and import western weapon components. One thing they could do is crack down on that, seize all shipments and companies and use that as leverage. Worst case scenario for Putin (but also unlikely) is Beijing joins the sanctions against Russia. In that scenario they only have Eritrea and their Indian bootlickers on their team. That said, China is on Team China, nothing else. Sanctions would harm China, so they wouldn't do that, in principle.
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