Cruise Missile Launches In Sea of Japan Highlight The Russian Military's Distractions Amid Ongoing Warhead
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Note: The following text was originally posted on my X/Twitter account.
More on the theme of the Russian military being occupied—"distracted"—by pursuits that often have little, if anything, to do with the war effort and which sometimes come at the direct expense of the war effort. The Russian Ministry of Defence has released a video showing the Pacific Fleet's Udaloy-class frigate (ex-destroyer) Marshal Shaposhnikov launching a 3M14 Kalibr land-attack cruise missile and a Kh-35 Uran anti-ship cruise missile during a training event in the Sea of Japan. While the Russian military and Russian military industry have to undertake test launches in non-combat conditions (at an instrumented test range with telemetry, etc.), it makes little sense to launch such scarce and in-demand strike munitions in a training event when there is a high-intensity war underway with plenty of targets in Ukraine for such strike munitions to attack. As with so many prior wartime cases, Russia's political and military leadership continues to prioritize the spectacle of military power—which in Russia's case is for the most part a Potemkin-style facade—over the maximally effective employment of Russia's finite and inadequate military capabilities in the Russia-Ukraine War.
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