From this morning’s Jolt:
A sample of John Kerry’s keen eye for foreign policy:
“Russia chose this brazen act of aggression and moved in with its forces on a completely trumped up set of pretext, claiming that people were threatened. And the fact is that that’s not the act of somebody who is strong, that’s the act of somebody who is acting out of weakness and out of certain kind of desperation.”
Above: What Kerry calls ‘weak.’
Kurt Schlichter points out that despite CNN’s chryon, those aren’t tanks, they’re mobile artillery. Sharper eyes and minds than me may correct me, but it looks like Kurtis Marsh may be right, that these are 2S1 Gvozdika, or some variation of it. Presuming the Wikipedia entry is correct, these artillery have a range of 10 to 14 miles.
In other words, this is a tool for projecting destructive power a significant distance away, not just occupying a territory full of ethnic Russians eager to politically rejoin their motherland. This isn’t proof that Russia intends to take a bigger bite out of Ukraine, but if they wanted to… they have some of the tools they would need in place.