Don't Expect A Rush To Bring Ukraine's Tanks Out Of Storage

Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today we have reports from Medium, The Planetary Society and Think Progress.

It may not sound surprising, but the figures on how badly the cards are stacked against Ukraine's army is staggering.

No, the real flaw in the Ukrainian army is its poor readiness. "Ukraine's military suffers from a number of key structural weaknesses that severely undermine its nominal strength," geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor asserts.

Budget estimates vary, but Moscow's 2013 military spending was probably close to $100 billion, compared to Kiev's $2 billion. "Ukraine could not hope to adequately maintain its over-sized equipment inventory," Stratfor notes. Constrained funding also limits training.

A pretty big goof in the haste to update technology without actually seeing what was needed to communicate.

How could this happen? Well, the fact that ISEE-3 is still broadcasting a carrier signal was actually an error; it should have been shut down. If they had planned for it to still be functioning at this point, they would have maintained the capability to communicate with it. I don't comprehend the intricacies of deep-space communications well enough to understand the obstacles here, and I don't question their conclusion, but that doesn't make me any less sad.

Another Ukraine piece, but it's interesting from an important perspective.

With all of the speculation regarding Russia's motives and endless posturing over what's in Ukraine's best interest, the perspectives of those that matter most, actual Ukrainians, seem to get lost along the way. "The radical voices are always the loudest," said Olga, a native of Sevastopol, Crimea who moved to the U.S. in 2007. "I wish there were some moderate voices in between that would be heard."

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