gzt: Germany announces first offensive weapons for Ukraine. Seven self propelled howitzers:

gzt: What does the optional accessory do? It looks like a giant noise suppressor.

gzt: What does the optional accessory do? It looks like a giant noise suppressor.

gzt: What does the optional accessory do? It looks like a giant noise suppressor.

Its for early morning shelling and you dont want to wake your neighbors.

Considerate bombardment.

kingdragonfly  Admiral Makarov,

Its a mystery, spontaneous combustion, seems to be a thing in Russia.
Someone smoking next to the May 9th fireworks ?

There is a story from one of the foreign volunteers.
Stalking Russian units to hit with ATGMs, when a couple of the others in the team went out of the position to smoke.

Maybe it was the Thales IR vision systems that the French kindly supplied Russia, 
to upgrade them to world standard.
Smokers were quickly spotted and they soon had turret facing them, followed by shells.

The smokers did not survive, and others only just managed to exit the area. 

If not for smoking it would have been Russians getting an ATGM that time , not the reverse.

Smoking Kills. 

kingdragonfly: The vessel, the Admiral Makarov, was reportedly struck near Snake Island by Ukrainian-made Neptune anti-ship missiles....

Kookoo: It's been 2 days and no confirmation from any other source, and that video on Twitter looks extremely fake. Perfectly parallel identical plumes of smoke are a dead giveaway. Gotta be either a video game footage or a haphazard montage job.

Perhaps, although that frigate also provides medium range anti-aircraft cover and Ukraine bombed Snake Island using manned Su-27s over the weekend - so clearly the antiair defense situation has now degraded significantly or they would not have risked them. They also took out a Tor short-range launcher on the island with a drone first, as well as the replacement in the process of being unloaded at the pier.

This is a very good read: The Debt is Paid - by Alan Flanagan - 3am Thoughts (substack.com)

 

And few of any generation in Germany today are beyond the post-war generations. It is time for Germany's post-war reckoning to move into another phase. There is not a single nation on earth who has undertaken this national process of reckoning with the past, of owning the sins of the fathers, with the vigour of Germany from the 1960's onwards. Japan has buried its head in the sand about its horrific campaign of murder across Asia from 1931 onwards. The U.S. still cannot muster any productive dialogue about the legacy of slavery without it descending into politicised slur campaigns. Britain still has a stiff upper lip about its colonial past. And Russia is a resurgent, revisionist, aggressive power, picking up where the Tsars and Stalin left off.

 

It is as if we need an army of Robin Williams' in wooly sweaters to knock on the door of every person in Germany born after 1945 and walk in saying “it's not your fault” repeatedly until the moment of catharsis.

 

Or that of the 190,000 German civilians trapped in Königsberg when the Russians seized the city, only 50,000 were returned to Germany in 1949. Or, as MacGregor illustrates in ‘Germany: Memoirs of a Nation’, that the expulsion of 14-million Germans from the fifth of Germany's historical territory in the East seized by the Allies and Russia constitutes one of the largest single forced migrations in history (only rivalled by the aftermath of the partition of India and Pakistan). Or that an estimated 2-million German women were raped by Red Army soldiers in the apocalyptic final months of the war. Or that some of the largest mass suicides in history took place in towns throughout East Germany during those months, mothers tying themselves to their children with ropes and plunging into icy rivers rather than fall into the hands of the advancing Russian army (with most men dead or at the front, the suicides were largely women, children, and the elderly).

 

This all happened. And none of it excuses, explains, or diminishes the monstrosity of the crimes also committed in the name of the Third Reich. It matters that we are able to hold both in tension because for this post-war Germany, the debt is paid: we cannot change the past, but we can ask to own our histories and learn from it. Germany has made this ownership of the past a part of its national psyche. It is a model democracy, and a lynchpin of the imperfect European project.

 

This VE Day, in addition to paying homage to the Allies who brought about the end of the Third Reich, I'm also acknowledging that Germany will never again be the country it was between 1933 and 1945. But as I write this, I cannot say anything of a similar vein about Russia, because the Russia we see in Ukraine today eerily resembles a Russia we’ve seen before in history. And within her borders are victims as well as culprits.

 

Couldn't agree more. Step out from under the umbrella, Germany. The West needs you to pull together against this Russian outrage.