SpectralTransition - Views and Updates on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Dear friends, family and colleagues, For the past two days I have been contemplating about the next blog: battlefield update or the Game of Thrones that’s going on in Russia. You see, we are leaving Lord of the Rings analogies here and entering a true Game of Thrones. As such, I have chosen to focus on Russia, because what happened there on Saturday has severe implications for the global security architecture for the rest of the 21st century and will ultimately lead to the only ticket out of this mess for Ukraine. So on Saturday very early morning messages started to flow in that Wagner PMC mercenary forces led by Yevgeny Prigozhin captured a couple of cities and were marching on Moscow. After some impressive aerial shootdowns, the march ended as abruptly as it started. I got a lot of you on Whatsapp that were in utter state of confusion. To be honest, it took me a couple of days to figure out what happened. But the picture is clear now and in short, the chaos Russia is heading to...

Dear friends, family and colleagues, We are steadily moving towards the main punch of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Twitter exploded into enthusiasm yesterday when the first Ukrainian Leopard 2 tanks appeared at the front and moved into an equal level of sadness when the video of the first destroyed Leopard 2 appeared, leading to a lot of comments that the Ukrainian offensive had failed. Fact is that the Ukrainians are still probing and the main armored punch hasn’t started yet. The Ukrainians gave this away themselves with two tiny details that no analyst on Twitter picked up, but I did. 1.        The Leopard II’s the Ukrainians deployed, are earlier model 2A4’s. This is the version without the up-armored front and still or shorter length barrel. Guido on Twitter: "#Leopard on the hunt.... https://t.co/qNIHwouBhw" / Twitter Besides the earlier model. In the footage that the Russians posted, you can only see around four Leopards and around 10...