Article snippet: Posted at 4:12 pm on June 23, 2017 by streiff On Monday, I posted about the Russian response to a US Navy Super Hornet shooting down a Syrian SU-23 that was attacking anti-ISIS forces supported by the United States. The initial Russian response was pretty much what you’d expect from a Kremlin that looks back fondly at the Brezhnev era: This was pretty obviously busllsh** at the time as the Russians simply don’t have the combat power in the theater to make that threat stick, they don’t have the military competence to make it stick if they did have the combat power, and the policy works directly against the interests of their Syrian allies. The lack of a deconfliction hotline is inevitably going to result in more and more Syrian aircraft smoldering on the ground. In short order the “treat as targets” went by the board. No, said the Russians, we just mean we will keep track of where your aircraft are. The weakness of the Russian bluster was demonstrated on Tuesday when a USAF F-15E dropped a drone used by an Iranian sponsored militia group in the exclusion zone around the US SOF camp at al Tanf… which is well west of the Euphrates. Now the final piece has fallen into place. It was revealed that the deconfliction hotline is still operational: So, just to recap, of all the threats made by Russia, none of them were actually carried out. Link to the full article to read more