Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States have lifted restrictions on the types of weapons that can be supplied to Ukraine, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced on May 26. (video)
The move clears the way for the EU to send its most powerful and long-range missiles to Kyiv that can strike targets deep inside Russian territory, something the allies have been reluctant to do for fears of escalating tensions with the Kremlin and possibly provoking a direct clash between Russia and Nato countries in Europe.
"There are no longer any range restrictions on weapons supplied to Ukraine, not from the British, not from the French, not from us, not from the Americans either. This means that Ukraine can now also defend itself by attacking military positions in Russia, for example,” Merz said during an interview on German television. “It couldn’t do that until some time ago, and with very few exceptions, it didn’t do that until some time ago. Now it can. In jargon, we call this long-range fire, i.e., equipping Ukraine with weapons that attack military targets in the rear.”
The decision comes the day after Russia launched a devastating missile and drone barrage on Ukraine over the weekend of May 23-25 that largely targeted civilian targets in Kyiv and many other urban centres in Ukraine – amongst the largest attacks since the war started over three years ago.
…
The decision also clears the way for Germany to deliver its powerful Taurus cruise missiles that Kyiv had been asking for, but Berlin had so far been reluctant to supply. Merz didn’t mention the Taurus missiles by name during his interview, but has suggested that unlike former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he was not against supplying Kyiv with the missile, which can hit Russian targets deep in the rear or could destroy the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula.
Good hunting, I assume they know the location of more than one dacha belonging to Vlad
Slava Ukraini
Am I the only one surprised to see the USians supporting this? In spite of Trump. Just great!
If anyone can share details on this… It would be very welcome
Trump probably doesn’t understand what it means
IF Trump is mentally competent enough to know what it means then something probably happened in private between Trump and Putin. Both the old men are aggressive and senile so it’s difficult to say what exactly. Maybe Putin dropped the bombshell statement that he wants to be in charge of the USA.
Let’s see if this forces the Russians to negotiate in good faith. Either way, now the ukrainians can fight better
Good faith and Russia don’t ever belong in the same sentence. They only understand superior armaments.
Good and hopefully the weapons will tear new assholes into the Muscovites. Destroy the fucking Kerch bridge too!
Excellent! I’m genuinely looking forward reading all about international terrorist Putin’s inevitable blind date with a cruise missile.
giving what was lost in 1994 to ukraine too?,
They should have done this a year ago, though now’s the second best time.
I hope this announcement means that the Taurus missiles are already in Ukrainian hands, and ideally one of them is rapidly approaching a high-value target that has hitherto been considered safe.
They should have done it at the start of the conflict
Or admitted Ukraine to NATO the first time Putler started making expansionist noises towards it.
I was just wondering to myself how long the West intended to just eat Russia’s shit when it comes to this constant disinformation undermining the integrity of their states before they would stop playing by the rules even the tiniest little bit. Unless every single Western leader is compromised it just didn’t make sense - and that level of compromise just didn’t seem likely. Maybe this is it.
I think it’s more about keeping Putler away from the nuke button. The West can easily take Russia. But Putler is an evil man who might prefer a burning world over defeat.
Xi has actually been the one slapping Putin’s wrist whenever the Russian dictator makes threats with nukes, even if the threats are empty. With three years of empty repetitive threats and Xi leashing Putin about it, this may have emboldened the West to finally allow Ukraine deep strikes and thinking to themselves “aww…the dog is all bark after all.”
Although on the one hand, some countries are still reliant on Russian gas and oil imports and receive them in stealthy ways. So the other motivation is not just fear of nukes, but also the possibility of economic paralysis if oil and gas supplies are affected.
A kind of terrifying thought Ive had, what if theyre waiting for russia to go ‘all in’ so that it can be attacked, stopped and occupied for profit.
Winning a nuclear war is unfortunately still losing
A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.. ... HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?Exactly.
Yes, their “what’s the point of having a world if Russia isn’t in it” proves how insane they are.
Fuck 'em up
This is pretty much always the result of widespread bombardment of civilian cities. It seems like it would result in people suing for peace, and if you have a certain type of psychopathic version of how to interact, it seems for that reason like it would be a good idea. But it just doesn’t work. Even if you kill a huge fraction of people in the country and reduce a bunch of their cities to rubble, what they want to do is fuck you up even worse in retaliation, not suddenly become submissive and hope you will stop.
Ukraine’s not even retaliating in kind, just hitting military and strategic targets inside Russia. Anyway. Fuck 'em up.
It would be pleasant to hear that the multi billion dollar mansion where putin sometimes resides cops a decent amount of “rain”. With him in it at the time would be the icing on the cake.
It’s full of mold. Putin won’t be there.
It would still be a good humiliation
Finally. But what’s been going on in Russia isn’t making sense either.
Consider: Some estimates show Russia used 69 missiles and 298 drones between May 23-25.
Googling, “How much does a Russian drone cost?” gives: The cost of Russian drones varies significantly depending on the type and capabilities. Some cheaper drones like the “Ghoul” quadcopter cost as little as $500, while others, like the Shahed-136, are estimated to range from $20,000 to $80,000. More advanced drones, such as the Merlin-VR, can cost over $300,000
So let’s say they used a mid-range drone, call it $30,000. 298 of them is $8,940,000.
Google again, “How much does a Russian missile used against Ukraine cost?”. Lots of variation, but call it $500,000 for each of the 69 used, for a total of $34,500,000.
So, for this two-day attack, they spent about $43-44 million dollars. And Google again, “How many people were killed in Ukraine May 23-25” says, “at least 12”.
Twelve people killed for $44 million. How stupid can you get? Do the Russians realize they could have simply bought the land they want in the Ukraine, if they’d done so through a dummy corporation or something like that?
I realize it’s the whole, “terror” thing, but frankly Ukraine ain’t terrified.
And now they’re going to be really well armed, and off the chain.
Thinking about this in terms of money spent is the wrong mindset. That 44 million dollars went from the hands of one Russian into the hands of another. And it even counts towards their GDP. On the other side, 12 Ukrainians are dead. Think about that. Depopulation, especially of working aged people is what’s really going to hurt your economy, not spending money on weapons.
As a sidenote, politicians often want you to believe that you can’t have nice things because “there isn’t enough money”. That is just bullshit.
This particular Russian attack seems to have been retaliatory in nature, because right before it Ukraine attacked Russian territory including Moscow with hundreds of drones at the same time.
Reported on here for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBAIalMNCAA
And here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NbxXJJJNZkI figure the logic of escalation here is something like “If Ukraine can already make massive strikes on Moscow with self produced drones there isn’t much sense in keeping up the range restrictions on NATO equipment anymore”.
The war never made economic sense. Russia was well off before, with a huge reserve. It could have invested in its own people. But it did not.
Even the second most important city of Russia, St Petersburg, is in shit ruins with infrastructure falling apart.
Well if you invest it into your people and infrastructure you can’t line you friends pockets 🤷♂️
Missile strikes like this are for damaging infrastructure as much as killing people. If they did enough economic damage it was worth the strike.
For example, look at that recent strike where Ukraine blew up that huge Russian ammo depot. Even if they killed nobody (that’s what Russia claimed lmao), it took out 264,000 tons of missiles, drones, and artillery shells!
Ukraine shut down 266 drones and 45 missiles.
That leaves 24 missile and 32 drone hits.
Even if they target infrastructure, 12 seems to be a very low number of casualities.
I would say that either Russia can’t aim or Ukraine is understating their defence capabilities.
There are air raid sirens. Hitting an empty building makes two dozen homeless, but kills nobody. Hitting in a schoolyard might main and cripple dozens, but kill nobody.
And of course, Ukraine is a country at war. They have an interest in understating casualties.
But in the end, terror bombing doesn’t work. It didn’t work for the Nazis, it didn’t work against the Nazis. It didn’t work in Vietnam, or Korea, or anywhere anyone has ever tried it. And it’s not working now.
I’m quite sure that not all losses/hits are reported to prevent easy damage assessment. With all my contempt for Russia, I cannot imagine that they didn’t hit any actually useful target. The mass of munitions is generally used to overwhelm defences.
And we can’t forget the information/propaganda part of this war excellently played by both countries here, even though in different ways. It makes sense for Ukraine to play up the murder of civilians and not mention military losses.
Of course, I may be completely wrong here and the orcs are just trying to intimidate Ukraine to surrender with that. But that has rarely worked and definitely won’t work on Ukraine.
Great comment but I’d just like to say that I’m pretty sure that there’s a hell of a lot of people over there that are indeed terrified.
Estonian military expert: Russia’s actions show they don’t really believe they can defeat Ukraine
Russia is trying to convince the world that they are winning their war on Ukraine, yet reality demonstrates the opposite, independent Riigikogu MP and Brigadier General (ret.) Alar Laneman said.
Time for Tomahawks as well, right?
Probably best to stick to something they can actually launch. The only ground-launched Tomahawks were nuclear weapons, and they haven’t been around since the 80s.
On the other hand, im sure if Ukraine got a few dozen of them, they’d make it work.
The US Marines for the Long-Range Missile Battery, which is a ground based system able to launch Tomahawks. Basically a Mk41 on a truck.
Sure, Ukraine would improvise :) OTOH aren’t there also sea-launched ones? Shouldn’t be hard to adopt those.
As another poster replied: There are land-based launchers for (modified) Tomahawks, in the Typhon. What works against chinese ships would probably also work fine against russian surface sites (with a different type of cruise missile, probably)
The INF went away in 2019 and the Typhon system entered service in 2023 so…ground launched Tomahawks are back on the menu.
I totally forgot about the Typhon!
But that one looks like something i’ve done in KSP.
Get rekt putler
Merz didn’t mention the Taurus missiles by name during his interview, but has suggested that unlike former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he was not against supplying Kyiv with the missile, which can hit Russian targets deep in the rear or could destroy the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula.
Scholz may be out but his party SPD are still in the coalition and his goons already ruled out sending Taurus. And without Taurus, the entire statement is kinda pointless, as Germany hasn’t sent anything else that could reach far inside Russia, and France and UK never opposed using their already delivered Scalp/Storm Shadow to hit targets inside Russia.
Scholz wasn’t willing to make the call for delivering Taurus missiles. Merz does seem willing.
Yeah but he’s in a coalition with the SPD and if they really want to, which it seems they do, they can block Taurus or break the coalition. https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/ausland/internationale-politik/id_100720802/wird-die-taurus-lieferung-zum-streitfall-miersch-spd-gegen-union-.html
The SPD fraction isn’t unified when it comes to this and the misgivings are about “Not becoming a party to the war” not Taurus as such. As delivering weapons does not make anyone a party to anything all they have to do is to stop falling for Putin’s psyop.
