Ukraine War: Slow Going World War, But Putin Wants You To Know He Is A Killer

Opinions about where and how Ukraine should attack, with its depleted means, are to be taken with a grain of salt:  disinformation played a crucial role in 1944. The Nazis were told, and believed, that the attacks would come through the Pas De Calais, or the airfield in the alpine Vercors mesa in south-east France. So the Nazis held (Pas de Calais), or sent (Vercors) crack divisions which would have thrown allied troops back into the sea, had they been sent to Normandy.   

For a few weeks, the Nazis were one division short of throwing the Allies in the sea. They engaged more th 10,000 troops in Vercors, including rare elite SS paratroopers.

France has tripled her 155mm shell production, to feed Ukraine’s needs, and has sent long range French made Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles to Ukraine. However the number of these missiles is less than 2,000. NATO was not, and is not ready for world war… which is what we have… and why we have it. War production, the Defense Industrial Base, needs to grow enormously to satisfy Ukraine’s needs 

The “combined arm approach” means nothing with that capability the Russians have to make enormous, extremely dense minefields in a few minutes, seeded by rockets. 

The First World War lasted as long as it did because Germany was able to obtain, from “neutral” countries (US, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden) the crucial materials it needed. When the US entered the war, the blockade became effective and German explosive production collapsed to a tenth of the french production.

We have a similar situation now. Russia rains missiles on Ukraine, and those missiles are full of Western electronics. That needs to stop, the blockade must be made effective. 

The “Kaiserreich”, the military dictatorship cum plutocracy run by Kaiser Wilhem II was a fascist regime which knew itself to be condemned long term by socialism, democracy and obsolescence from more open, smarter societies. Its top leaders determined those facts to be true, and decided that a world war was the way out, defeating in quick succession the French Republic, then democratizing and modernizing Russia, before Britain, which did not have an army, could react. Then Britain was supposed to negotiate. This was decided in December 1912. US meddling on June 1 1914, promising a world government with Britain, and the Sarajevo assassination, removing a partisan of peace, the dour Archduke, heir to Austria Hungary but also best friend of the Kaiser, cleared the way.

The Kaiser’s dream of world supremacy crashed down as France counterattacked and nearly destroyed the entire German army at the First Battle of the Marne, 5 weeks after the treacherous attack by a regime of war criminals. A stalemate resulted, until the blockade became effective.

There are lots of analogies between Putin’s Reich and the Kaiserreich. Putin, thought is more of a direct killer… and Putin’s plans and motivations are public. Putin also wants the world to know he will kill whoever is in the way: thus the killing of the boss of the Wagner Group, Prigozhyn was made in full daylight, with a nice video of his crashing plane. 

Wagner boss Prigozhyn’s plane shot down north-west of Moscow, August 23, 2023.

Truth telling by Prigozhyn:

The invasion was nothing more than a massive land grab by the Russian oligarchy, Prigozhin charged, designed to enrich the country’s powerful elites while poor Russians served as cannon fodder. Russian claims that a Nazi regime in Ukraine, backed by NATO, was about to attack Russia were lies, Prigozhin said. The war was started by the Russian oligarchy to benefit themselves and gain power. In his rant, Prigozhin did not criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, focusing instead on the broader Russian elite, and specifically on his personal enemy Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

“The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there were insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO bloc,” Prigozhin said on his Telegram channel on June 23. The truth, he said, was that “there was nothing extraordinary happening on the eve of February 24,” the day last year when Russian invaded. Ukraine was not planning any kind of attack against Russia, he added.

Russia’s invasion “was started for a completely different reason,” Prigozhyn said. “What was the war for? The war was needed for Shoigu to receive a hero star. … The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war,” he said. “The mentally ill scumbags decided: ‘It’s OK, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as cannon fodder. They’ll die under artillery fire, but we’ll get what we want.’” What they wanted was Ukrainian land the plutocrats around Putin could real-estate speculate with… Prigozhyn explained.

“Shoigu killed thousands of the most combat-ready Russian soldiers in the first days of the war,” Prigozhin said, adding that the invasion began even as Zelenskyy and Ukraine were eager for peace. The Ukrainian leader “was ready for agreements. All that needed to be done was to get off Mount Olympus and negotiate with him.” [Zelinskyi was the pro-Russian presidential candidate, ready to make concessions to Putin. He was elected on that peace plan over his more combative predecessor Perevshenko!]

Prigozhin thus destroyed the main argument used by Russian propagandists and their Western lackeys: that NATO’s eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War caused the war in Ukraine. Putin has constantly railed against NATO, and his misleading narrative that the U.S. caused the war in Ukraine by pushing for alliance’s expansion has resonated widely among pro-Putin fascist lovers in the West.

It will be a slow grind, like the world wars of the Twentieth Century. An old Kremlin mentality, that tyranny is best for Mother Russia, is trying to expand against a more democratically inclined world. The forces in presence are unbalanced in many ways: the leader of Russia is probably even more unbalanced, more pathologically evil, and in a very similar way, than Adolf Hitler himself (after all Hitler never threatened to kill all of humanity, just a long list with the French, the Jews, etc.)… but then Putin masters the imbalance of nukes… Yet can only be unbalanced as his greatest ally, China, wants to recover much of what the Kremlin owns or controls…

With such a set of ambushes and imbalances all over, the West has to be careful and steady… But re-armament must be a priority (it’s not yet).

Starting with rearmament of moods… In the past, the Netherlands and Denmark, served, crucially, the fascist invading Kaiserreich, and Hitler’s Reich… Now they are going to send F16s to Ukraine… Not very many, but the right mood, the democratic mood, is now animating them. Progress.

Patrice Ayme 

Encourage A Coup In Russia

The United Nations Charter Article 51 gives inherent right of individual or collective self-defense in the event of an attack against a UN member state. 

UN member Ukraine has been attacked, we have the right to defend it. 

The best thing the Russian military, and its elite Wagner PMC, can do, is a coup. 

If Russian generals arrest Putin, they will redeem themselves: they will be able to argue that they were forced to obey orders until it became absolutely clear they were led by a corrupt, demented clique, and that the orders given to them violated the United Nations charter.

The coalition of more than 50 democracies providing weapons to Ukraine is acting in obedience of Article 51 of the UN and that should inspire Russian generals. 

Nazism was made possible because it had too many investors (US plutocrats) and allies (Kremlin, Japan). In general the fascist dictatorships of the 1930s, even Japan and the USSR depended, physically and psychologically upon trade or investment from wealthy Western actors. 

Major Western companies which still trade with Putin. They should be forced to stop.

Corruption in Russia has been made as profitable as it is because it traded what was stolen in Russia against what the oligarchs wanted in the West… and got from their plutocratic alter ego in the West. For example, hotel chains… 

The German army failed to arrest the Nazis, because they didn’t get support in the West (they asked) [1]. Let’s not repeat the mistake. 

Patrice Ayme

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[1] As early as 1937 the German military (army, navy and intelligence) plotted a coup against Hitler. They just asked the UK and US to officially side with France (against Nazism). I have written exhaustively on this, it can also be found in the book “In the Garden of the Beasts”, where the French and US ambassador met to avoid the listening devices. Roosevelt reacted by firing the amabassador, his friend U of Chicago history professor Dodd…. And replacing him by a pro-Nazi (as he did in London).

There is no doubt a coup would have worked. The history of the world would have been very different. Not as US Deep State friendly, one may guess…

***

[New York Times ran an editorial 7/12/2023 on “How to manage Putin”. The comment above was my answer. The NYT didn’t publish it. Probably didn’t like the part about corruption in the West being the root of the problem…]

General “Armageddon” on the left, named thus for his butchery in Syria, is on the left. More specifically, Sergei Surovikin, a man Russian media have dubbed “General Armageddon” to hype his fearsome reputation as the guy who flattened the huge Syrian city of Aleppo in 2016, using mostly aircraft. Surovikin is the chief of the Russian air force (which was dispatch to flatten Wagner, but suffered heavy losses instead).

Surovikin is an ally, and maybe secret VIP member, of Wagner PMC. He has the same rank (four star) as Gerasimov, the armed forces chief of staff, on the right, who is apparently devoted to Putin and author of the botched invasion of Ukraine and great theoretician of “hybrid warfare”. Hybrid warfare depends heavily on fith column elements in the West such university professors, corrupt politicians (Marine Le Pen?? Trump???? Obama? Certainly Schroder, Berlusconi, and Merkel…), and journalists and bloggers all over claiming Putin is wisdom reincarnated, under NATO assault…)…

The tale gets further twisted by the fact that multi billionaire Prigozhin, “Putin’s chef”, an ex-convict, was the head of the Internet propaganda effort of Gerasimov’s hybrid warfare…

Yevgeny Prigozhin might want to watch out for any poisoning attempts by Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Joe Biden joked during a press conference on Thursday 7/13/2023.

“If I were he I’d be careful what I ate. I’d keep my eye on my menu,” Biden said during a joint press conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinistö in Helsinki.

***

[As my censorship by the NYT shows, the entanglement of corruption in Russia and the West is the bottom problem; NYT knows very well the Deep State advises never to approach that subject… which is fully obvious in the case of Hunter Biden, who seems to have got well above 5 million dollars, just from one billionairess in Moscow and one company in Ukraine… for “consulting” then he presented this as loans, and instead of trying to send Hunter to prison, the IRS, well, didn’t do much, although the whole planet knows…]

Holodomor, Kremlin Ordered Genocide Against Ukraine, 1933

Once, according to Nobel prize Winston Churchill, Stalin joked in a conversation at Yalta that he had killed even more Soviets than Hitler did. And Hitler had killed on the order of twenty million Soviet soldiers and citizens, at least. At Yalta, the Roosevelt administration decided to give half of Europe to the Kremlin dictator. Keeping allies of France such as Poland and Czekoslovakia under Kremlin subjugation was going to facilitate the next step in the American Deep State subjugation of the world, namely the so-called “decolonization” (Since Stalin owed his survival to the US, in more ways than one, Stalin was actually Americanization’s thoroughly stealth creature; on the biggest historical scale, Stalin can be viewed as an agent of the US Deep State…)

The Holodomor refers to the man-made, or, more exactly, Kremlin-made, famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. (By the way Ukraine was independent before being absorbed into the USSR.)

The Holodomor was primarily concentrated in Ukraine. However, it also affected other regions of the Soviet Union, particularly areas with predominantly non-Russian ethnic populations. These regions included parts of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Kuban region of the North Caucasus.

Kulaks, the prosperous peasants, often with large landholdings, had opposed collectivization, that is, forced expropriation. Stalin reacted to the kulaks’ resistance with deportation and extermination. Many Ukrainians were sent to Eastern Siberia, and their descendants constitute a large part of the population there. 

For the Kremlin motivation in subjugating Ukraine to terror, one just needs to know that Ukraine was the wealthiest part of the USSR. Ukraine’s agricultural lands, abstracted by its gold (wheat field) and blue (sky) flag, is colossal. The industrial, mineral wealth of the Donbas was massively developed by Western European financial, engineering and human capital in the early Twentieth Century.

(Ukraine was so wealthy that Hitler ordered Guderian, who was thrusting his Panzers towards Moscow, to divert and go backwards to seize Ukraine. Guderian first refused. Meeting with his top generals, Hitler condescendingly told them that he didn’t expect mere generals to understand the economic aspects of war. Seizing Ukraine worked, but then Stalin was able to counterattack in front of Moscow, causing huge losses to the Wehrmacht.)

While Ukraine bore the brunt of the Holodomor and experienced the most severe consequences, the policies and actions that led to the famine were part of a broader Soviet agricultural and political strategy. The Soviet government implemented collectivization and grain procurement policies that disproportionately affected Ukraine’s rural population, leading to widespread starvation and loss of life.

The exact extent of the Holodomor’s impact on non-Ukrainian regions is a subject of ongoing historical research and debate. While evidence suggests that the famine had significant consequences outside of Ukraine, the scale and severity of the famine varied across different regions.

Some countries and international organizations recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. For example the French Republic officially recognized the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people. The vote in the French National Assembly was followed by a vote of the French Senate on 28 March 2023, and the law was signed by the president. Holocaust denial is a crime in France punishable by prison. The holocausts of the Jews, Armenians and Ukrainians is officially recognized in France.

There are other holocausts. For example that of the Native Americans. It’s important to recognize holocausts, because such recognition exposes the mood which made the holocaust possible. Denial is always an important part of it.

The German government agreed in 2021 to recognize the killings of two ethnic groups in Namibia as genocide. It will pay more than a billion dollars in compensation to start with. German soldiers targeted people of two ethnic groups — the Herero and the Nama — because they had resisted land grabs by German settlers. Africans were shot, hanged, abandoned in the desert and died in concentration camps.

 The genocide in Namibia followed closely the crimes against humanity which the British authorities committed against the (white!) Boers in South Africa, next door. In turn, the Namibia genocide inspired Germany’s ally, Turkey, to kill millions of Armenians, and that no doubt incited in turn Stalin to do the same to Ukraine, which in turn encouraged Italian fascists in Ethiopia, Japanese troops in China, and franco’s rogue army in Spain to also mass murder in full sight. The Namibian genocide was led by Goering, father to the future second in command of the Third Reich… So it was definitely a precursor of the Holocaust…

Now the world has changed… Even Turkey’s president wants Ukraine inside NATO….

Patrice Ayme

The Holodomor has long been well-known…

Ukraine Needs Air Supremacy To Break Through The Trenches Of The Criminal Tyrant’s Nuclear Rogue State

Ukraine has found it nearly impossible to break through the Russian fortifications, which are dozens of kilometers deep, with millions of mines. 15% of US armor engaged was destroyed. Ukrainians have used sophisticated rocket systems destroying hundreds of mines in one shot, but Orcs come back, reinstall mines. Orcs’ loitering drones (“Lancet”) and attack helicopters have been effective.

We’ve seen this before, in WW1 and WW2. Air supremacy is key. Ukraine must have it. With air supremacy several problems hindering Ukraine will be solved, and Putin’s lines will be pounded (planes carry much higher loads of bombs than missile systems: a French Rafale stealth fighter bomber can carry nine tons of bombs, and an F16 nearly seven tons!)

In 1939, 40 French divisions couldn’t breach the Nazi “West Wall”. That “Wall” even deprived of its heavy guns (sent to coastal fortifications by the Nazis), stopped the Allies for 6 months in 1944-45. 

In central Italy Nazi lines held for years. In particular at the Hitler (later, “Gustav”) line going through Monte Cassino. The Allies found necessary to destroy Monte Cassino, a world famous monastery, and many other monuments.

Formidable entrenched lines are nearly impossible to breach. At Bir Hakeim, in May-June 1942, 3703 French soldiers, carefully buried in the flat desert with mines fields and prepared firing positions, were able to stop the entire Afrika Korps led by Rommel in the front lines, and the entire Italian armor, for 16 days, preventing the encirclement and destruction of the only British (and Allied) army between Britain and India. The French finally evacuated after losing one third of their force, running out of ammunition and accomplishing their mission. Rommel said of his own front line fighting:”The fate of my army depended upon it”. 40 planes were shot down over the battlefield.

As the US force bottled at Anzio showed, air supremacy is crucial. When the black 99th fighter squadron showed up, the beachhead was saved. 

Ukrainians must have air supremacy above Ukraine to block attacks by drones, helicopters and flying bombs dropped from afar. Then they will be able to clear the minefields and trenches in peace. As the Wagner group just showed, in an area without minefields, an armed column can advance very fast with portable anti-aircraft means.

Send F16s!

F16s will not just clear the air, but clear the trenches…

Now, granted a lot of the slow going in providing weapons to Ukraine is that the West… come from the West having no weapons to send. For example, Rafale fighter-bombers would be better than F16s… But there are not enough of them. A bit more than one Rafale a week is produced now (hundreds of suppliers are involved)… The production should be ten times that…  

It takes time to relaunch the production lines. For example, Thales`a giant French military electronics company has decided to relaunch production of Starstreak, which has proven highly successful in Ukraine. Starstreak is an ultrafast anti-aircraft missile with three tungsten darts, a unique conception impervious to jamming and lures. However it will take a year for the new missiles to come out of the Northern Ireland factory. Lockheed suggested restarting the production line of F16s…  

The war Putin launched is a world war: more than 40 democracies are sending weapons to Ukraine, and even the lower assembly of Switzerland, moved by the losses of Leopard tanks trying to breach through the giant Putin fortified lines, has decided to send 25 tanks to Ukraine (through Germany)!

The recently aborted coup of Wagner, the best unit of the Russian army, showed the danger that power in Russia would go from one demented thug who thinks he is an elected president (Putin)  to thugs who know they are thugs and act accordingly. So we are more than ever under the threat of a nuclear exchange, and the more the West dither about winning this war without upsetting who caused it, the greater the risk of nuclear exchange.

So make it so that Ukraine gets air supremacy. Between F15, F 16, F18, Rafales, Grippens and Typhoons, the West has literally thousands of fighter bombers not of the latest generations, but still better than what Ukraine has. They must be sent, and, if anything, the Wagner semi-coup shows that Russia is a nuclear rogue state. 

It needs to be disarmed…

By the way, congratulations to France and Britain for sending SCALP/Storm Shadow stealth cruise missiles to Ukraine. Three French missiles destroyed two bridges (the fourth missile barely missed) between the continent and Crimea.

Chonhar bridge hole from FRENCH SCALP missile used by the Ukraine Armed Forces. Another bridge close by was also disabled in the same strike by another missile (the Russians to their dismay found metal engraved inside with MBDA FRANCE).

Patrice Ayme

Benedict of Nursia established the very first monastery of his new order on this promontory in 529 CE. In Benedict’s time, the road leading to the monastery was already more than 10 centuries old and led to an ancient temple of Apollo. The Nazis used Monte Cassino as a fortress on the Hitler line, south of Rome. So the US Air Force demolished it. The danger to humanity posed by the nuclear rogue state is greater than the danger posed by the Axis in WW2. We have heard it, from the associates of Putin himself:”A world without Russia is not worth having!” (Russia, their way, with themselves on top…)

France 100% Allied With Ukraine, Must Go To “War Economy”. Francophobic, Treacherous New York Times Allies With Putin

Which side of the Ukraine war is which side of the Democratic establishment on? Well, Obama was on Putin’s side, and clearly Biden is on Zelinskyi’s side. However, the propagandist New York Times does not forget that its number one enemy is France. Let me quote: An Endgame for Ukraine, June 6, 2023:…”How should this end?

We can start by listing the ways in which it shouldn’t. The first is the one suggested last year by President Emmanuel Macron of France. “We must not humiliate Russia,” he argued, “so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.” At the time, to “not humiliate Russia” was code for allowing Russia to preserve its ill-gotten gains while it was on the offensive.”

That’s a pack of lying shit. And the NYT did even worse, after lying about Macron, the NYT advocates that 20% of Ukraine, including Crimea, should be given to Putin:”Winning comes in two flavors. The first, and riskier, is … to push Russia out of the territories it seized in this war, to retake Crimea and the breakaway “republics” in the east. This is what Ukrainians want, and what they are morally and legally entitled to.

But retaking Crimea will be hard, and even success will come with costs, primarily in the form of populations that aren’t necessarily eager to be liberated by Kyiv. Hence the second flavor: To help Ukraine restore its pre-February 2022 borders, but no further —”

Is the NYT completely senile? It advocates doing exactly what it claims to be outraged by, and, in contradiction of evidence, what it attributes to Macron. 

Amazingly, after sitting on my comment correcting them for hours, the NYT allowed the following to be published. No NYT reader “recommended “ it:.. Showing that not only the NYT is a problem for civilization, but so is its readership, apparently made of decerebrated, angry, gullible robots.

By “not humiliating Russia“, Macron meant just that, and only that. France officially will not negotiate returning Ukraine to anything less than her pre-2014 borders. No reward for aggression. The dozens of long range, high precision, ultra mobile French CAESAR 155mm guns have proven the most useful part of Ukrainian artillery: just one of them mounted on a barge forced the Russian to surrender Snake Island. Other howitzers tend to get destroyed by counter-battery fire… while a CAESAR is gone in seconds after a volley.  

Zelinskyi was provided, during his last tour, a jumbo jet from the French Republic, and he went all the way to Japan and back with it, under french colors for the whole world to see. So definitively, Macron is in Zelinskyi’s camp. 

Putin can’t be rewarded with one centimeter of Ukrainian territory, because, if he were, all could see that aggression pays… In any case, Putin will not negotiate… because his regime would collapse if he did. 

Even if Putin’s forces were ejected from Ukraine, Putin would keep on fighting. Fighting justifies Putin’s tyranny. So the West has to get ready for a very long war, barring the miracle of Putin’s personal disappearance…. Which could well happen as units of the Russian army and Wagner PMC have started to ambush and shoot at each other…

The run-up to full world war two in 1939  started in 1931, in China, and lasted 8 years. Too few countries took it seriously (or then, like the USA, and the USSR, decided to take advantage of the increasing conflict: US plutocrats made money all over, especially from trading with fascist regimes, for example selling oil to Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito; or developing Stalin’s oil). French president Macron has said that “France needs to go into a war economy”. Well, all the West does need to go to a war economy if it does not want the war with fascism to get way worse. Deterrence works, even during a world war! After all, the Nazis didn’t even try to use the gigantic reserves of nerve gas that they had, knowing that if they did, their population would be exterminated in return!

Patrice Ayme. 

Send Rafale Jets And Encircle Putin At Bakhmut

The Armed Forces of Ukraine must seize an opportunity. AFU is not so powerful that it can just overwhelm the Russians, who have more men, more equipment, more ammunition and an intact air force. So AFU needs to pierce, and then encircle.

As Putin’s soldiers are entrenched often for a year, and sometimes many years, AFU must create an opportunity. Bakhmut may be such an opportunity: at Stalingrad, Von Paulus’ Sixth Army, an elite army of thoroughly trained professionals which had conquered France, fought for months to conquer most of the city. It was not the sort of movement war the 6th army was best at, and its losses inside Stalingrad were huge. (As the Stalin cult diminished, Stalingrad is back to its original name of city on the Volga, Volgograd.)

But then, with the German 6th army fighting within the last blocks and factories of Stalingrad, in Operation Uranus, Soviet armies cut Paulus off from behind, far from Stalingrad, in a pincer movement. Uranus went through weaker,less motivated Italian and Rumanian armies.

Looking at the map, and where the elite Putin forces are, Bakhmut may present a similar opportunity. And indeed the AFU has been attacking the flanks of the Wagner PMC, perhaps the last elite force in the Russian armed forces after the huge losses Putin’s elite soldiers suffered in the first few days and months of the war.

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Modern jets would help Ukraine as they would prevent distant strikes from Su35 jets launching rocket assisted bombs. Su35s, the best Russian jets, have very long range radar and very long range missiles, plus long range bombs. As it is, Ukrainian ground radar operators can see Su35s target Ukrainian planes and launch long range (150 kms) missiles against them. After the alert is sent to Ukrainian planes, all they can do is dive for the deck, at three top level, to hide in ground clutter, to throw away the lock the missiles have on them.

Ukraine’s Mig 29s, Ukraine’s most advanced jets, are extremely maneuverable, at least initially, but they do not have the advanced radars, nor the long range missiles to deal with the Su35s.

Long range Putin bombing from aircraft is the argument for the F16s: recent F16s could see the approaching Su35, and launch their own missiles, before the Su35 could be close enough (50 kms to launch guided rocket assisted bombs). Worldwide, there are hundreds of recently made F16s with AESA radars… Unfortunately the F16s require long, very slick runways, of which Ukraine has relatively few.

But two European canard jets have even longer range missiles, the European Meteor, a ramjet, which can go further than any US air to air missile, and the European jets can handle worse runways than the F16… actually, because of their canards, they can take off from roads: the French Rafale and the Saab Gripen are arguably the best war fighting jets in the world. The Rafale has performed superlatively in Afghanistan and Libya… where it demonstrated its stealth effectiveness. Having the active stealth Rafales would nullify Putin’s air superiority. The hypersonic METEOR has a range of 200 kilometers, and has a no escape range of 60 kilometers (at least). Its big advantages is that it is very small, thus stealth, and throattable (so it can cruise below its max speed, and then accelerate to max speed)… This would enable METEOR to surprise its target… It’s the best air to air missile in the world. 

Britain courageously just sent Storm Shadow stealth cruise missiles to Ukraine. Storm Shadow is an Anglo-French low-observable, long-range, air-launched cruise missile developed since 1994 by Matra and British Aerospace… The French call it SCALP, and like the METEOR, it’s manufactured by MBDA… The French used it in Syria.

And what of Putin’s nuclear blackmail? A risk not to be taken is to consider that Putin is ready to use nuclear weapons: that would be tantamount to empowering the Kremlin tyrant with a life and death position of power over all of humanity. Paradoxically, taking that deranged tyrant seriously, encourages him to do more of the same, and discourages honorable Russian military officers to do the right thing, go and arrest Putin. The longer this war lasts, the worst it is for everybody, except for the criminal clique around Putin.

Patrice Ayme

What Ukraine, and the democracies need: European jets fighting Putin.

Two Swedish Gripens. The Gripen is a light fighter bomber, superficially similar to the Rafale, but smaller, and with just one engine (the Rafale has two). Both Gripen and Rafale are equipped with Meteor, a European ramjet missile with unsurpassed long range characteristics (the ramjet uses air as oxidizer, which allows it to go twice further, for the same mass, relative to solid fuel…) The Rafale carries much more bombs and missiles, has active stealth and can super cruise, at mach 1.4, fully armed. Both Rafale and Gripen can take off from roads… Rafale needs only 400 meters (less than 1,500 feet)… a huge advantage in the Ukraine war…