I do not think Tsar will pull actual cold war planes into hands of vicks all of a sudden, not on a short notice. They lack doctrine and skills to operate them anyway. And using his own forces - well, poptart has addressed that already. No Russian soldiers and thus not a single vicky who knows how to use cold war equipment, not in this war.
Thus not a single piece of cold war era equipment in hands of vickies, cause they lack skills to utilize it.
Again, go back to thinking about the Korean War.
There were, it is pretty well established by now, Russian pilots. In jets painted to look North Korean. Fighting the US Air Force, in what was
theoretically a UN operation to push the North Koreans out of South Korea.
It would be entirely precedented for
Russian totally not Russian Russian-speaking Victorians with citizenship papers dated to the middle of last week to show up piloting fighters considerably more dangerous than anything we've dealt with, IF our air defense missiles start doing a good job shooting down
Russian totally not Russian Victorian transport planes carrying
ammo humanitarian relief supplies for
the Victorian army the people of Toledo.
And that's assuming our SAMs even have the range to hit the
Russian totally not Russian Victorian transport planes, when our army is on the north bank of the Raisin and the transport planes are likely flying into Toledo.
It sounds like we need to actively court foreign sponsors.
Oh hell yes do we
ever.
But that's a project for the coming years.
I mean. I am ukrainian.
I know.
Thing is, due to loads of local separatists having gone through conscription which used similar hardware, need to retrain is often minimal.
In theory, applies even to Buk, although in practice local morons fucked it up cause lol separatists.
Notably, there are no, like, Russian armored divisions rolling in, you know? The russian forces do exist, sure, but they are uhh....not playing deciding role. Recall said Buk being operated by incompetent locals. If they could send their operators along with such fairly pricey thing? They would.
And this is fucking direct Russian border, not East Coast of USA.
Put this way.
Imagine if Putin were coming off of a fifty-year high of having reduced all rivals to his power, shattered all other great powers until only desperate coalitions of lesser nations dared to stand against him. Imagine Putin with
literally the world at his feet.
Now imagine the shit that Putin would be doing, in a Ukraine-like situation, with having
Russian totally not Russian local Donbass separatist locals who just happen to have moved there from Russia last week and resigned from the Russian armed forces the week before that to be come patriotic Donbass separatist locals
do you sense the sarcasm here, because I hope you do.
Alexander is very much like Putin, if Putin didn't think anyone could
possibly stop him and wasn't even worried about the possibility and hadn't needed to worry about it for thirty or forty years after succeeding in almost every undertaking he'd ever attempted throughout his life.
He's gonna try shit.
What I think the infopost tells us is that at worst the Russians might try to send supplies, but won't actually send forces against us. So a siege is still a good strategy, if we blocade any supplies. We can deny airdrops with our anti-air, and block anything from sea if we keep our ships there instead of on bombardment. Russians flying Russia-marked planes directly into the besieged area is a no-go because it'd run into far too many diplomatic tripwires, and anything less than that we can fully prevent. So, with all that, I think I'm going to fully switch my vote for Maneuver + Blockade.
I'm not as optimistic about our ability to stop supplies from being flown in as you are.
Remember that when the Victorians launched their big air attack on us when we were holding the Raisin Line, we had to
wait and sucker them in. This suggests that we couldn't simply pot their planes with missiles while we were on the Raisin Line and they were flying low over Toledo. Presumably we didn't have the range to do that. If we didn't have it then, then we won't have it a week or three from now when we're occupying the same positions.
And sure, supplies dropped off at Toledo Airport will have a difficult, unpleasant journey to get to frontline troops on the south bank of the Raisin, but it's not
impossibly far, just difficult. We can throttle back the rate at which those supplies reach the front, but we can't stop it.
Or just converting a section of the highway twenty kilometers away from the lake into a rough landing strip? The Candid was explicitly designed to use rough landing strips, and I doubt whatever the RuAF is using now would abandon the capability.
I will note that sizeable chunks of the interstate highway system were originally designed with that in mind, because the Strategic Air Command wanted the option of using them as emergency runways. With no maintenance for a long time it might take some preparation, but the Victorians could (and probably have before) turn(ed) stretches of highway into such airstrips.
Especially since we now know the Russians DO pull this trick of supplying Victorian expeditionary forces that run into trouble in the field. This isn't unprecedented. It may not even be the first time someone beat a Victorian field army, it's just that we're beating them harder, and the Russians can't interfere quite as blatantly to bail Victoria's ass out of the fire. So previously, people might win a battle against Victoria (probably against a smaller force too) but they'd still lose the war due to Russian supplies and airstrikes- and now the Victorians would be
pissed.
